Rehabilitation Robots FRIEND-I and FRIEND-II with the dexterous lightweight manipulator

The rehabilitation robotic systems FRIEND-I/-II belong to the category ‘intelligent’ wheelchair mounted manipulators. The systems are being developed at the Institute of Automation (IAT), University of Bremen, since 1997. They are used as a personal assistant to support disabled persons with upper-limb impairments in daily life situations as well as in the working environment. This paper gives an user oriented overview of the facilities of the FRIEND-I system as well as a description of the innovations of the currently developed FRIEND-II system. It will be shown that the concept of semi-autonomy enables the development of rehabilitation robotic systems that process tasks robustly on a relatively high level of abstraction. Additionally, the paper underlines the necessity to improve the manipulative flexibility of rehabilitation robots and describes the new control concept – Kinematic Configuration Control – of FRIEND-II’s dexterous robot arm having fluidic 5-finger hand and humanlike 7-joints kinematics.