A new passivity-based control technique for safe patient-robot interaction in haptics-enabled rehabilitation systems

In this paper, a new passivity-based technique is proposed to analyze and guarantee the stability of haptics-enabled telerobotic rehabilitation systems where there is a possibility of having more sources of non-passivity than communication delays. In practice, the difficulty of therapeutic exercises should be tuned taking into account the stage of physical disability. However, tuning the difficulty and intensity should not violate the stability of patient-robot interaction. This usually puts conservative prefixed limits on the allowable exercise intensity. In this paper, patient-robot interaction safety is studied in the context of Strong Passivity Theory (SPT). Our goal is to ultimately relax the limitation on the allowable robotic therapies while preserving system stability. The proposed stabilizing scheme does not try to make the entire non-passive component passive. This allows the therapist to have freedom in injecting energy into the system for assistive therapies while ensuring safe patient-robot interaction. In this paper, the case of telerobotic rehabilitation is considered. Experimental implementation and evaluation are presented to support the proposed theory.

[1]  Hermano Igo Krebs,et al.  Therapeutic Robotics: A Technology Push , 2006, Proceedings of the IEEE.

[2]  Mahdi Tavakoli,et al.  Transparent Time-Delayed Bilateral Teleoperation Using Wave Variables , 2008, IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology.

[3]  Septimiu E. Salcudean,et al.  Analysis of Control Architectures for Teleoperation Systems with Impedance/Admittance Master and Slave Manipulators , 2001, Int. J. Robotics Res..

[4]  C. A. Desoer,et al.  Nonlinear Systems Analysis , 1978 .

[5]  P. Olver Nonlinear Systems , 2013 .

[6]  Septimiu E. Salcudean,et al.  Transparency in time-delayed systems and the effect of local force feedback for transparent teleoperation , 2002, IEEE Trans. Robotics Autom..

[7]  Alon Wolf,et al.  Adaptive rehabilitation games. , 2013, Journal of electromyography and kinesiology : official journal of the International Society of Electrophysiological Kinesiology.

[8]  Rajnikant V. Patel,et al.  Networked teleoperation with non-passive environment: Application to tele-rehabilitation , 2012, 2012 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

[9]  Rajnikant V. Patel,et al.  Projection-based force reflection algorithms for teleoperated rehabilitation therapy , 2013, 2013 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

[10]  Heidar Ali Talebi,et al.  Control of time-delayed telerobotic systems with flexible-link slave manipulators , 2012, 2012 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

[11]  David J. Hill,et al.  Stability results for nonlinear feedback systems , 1977, Autom..

[12]  James Richard Forbes,et al.  Passive linear time-varying systems: State-space realizations, stability in feedback, and controller synthesis , 2010, Proceedings of the 2010 American Control Conference.

[13]  Ran Tao Haptic Teleoperation Based Rehabilitation Systems for Task-Oriented Therapy , 2015 .

[14]  Mahdi Tavakoli,et al.  Stability analysis of teleoperation systems under strictly passive and non-passive operator , 2013, 2013 World Haptics Conference (WHC).

[15]  Hyunchul Kim,et al.  Kinematic Data Analysis for Post-Stroke Patients Following Bilateral Versus Unilateral Rehabilitation With an Upper Limb Wearable Robotic System , 2013, IEEE Transactions on Neural Systems and Rehabilitation Engineering.

[16]  Rajnikant V. Patel,et al.  Involuntary movement during haptics-enabled robotic rehabilitation: Analysis and control design , 2014, 2014 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

[17]  N. Hogan,et al.  Motions or muscles? Some behavioral factors underlying robotic assistance of motor recovery. , 2006, Journal of rehabilitation research and development.

[18]  Curt Bay David Wu Expanding Tele-rehabilitation of Stroke Through In-home Robot-assisted Therapy , 2013 .