Related papers: Optimal Energy Shaping Control for a Backdrivable …
Exoskeletons play a crucial role in assisting patients with varying mobility levels during rehabilitation. However, existing control strategies face challenges such as imprecise trajectory tracking, interaction torque oscillations, and…
Recent work has shown that exoskeletons controlled through data-driven methods can dynamically adapt assistance to various tasks for healthy young adults. However, applying these methods to populations with neuromotor gait deficits, such as…
Lower limb exoskeletons show promise to assist human movement, but their utility is limited by controllers designed for discrete, predefined actions in controlled environments, restricting their real-world applicability. We present an…
High-performance actuators are crucial to enable mechanical versatility of lower-limb wearable robots, which are required to be lightweight, highly backdrivable, and with high bandwidth. State-of-the-art actuators, e.g., series elastic…
This paper presents and experimentally demonstrates a novel framework for variable assistance on lower body exoskeletons, based upon safety-critical control methods. Existing work has shown that providing some freedom of movement around a…
This paper presents design principles for comfort-centered wearable robots and their application in a lightweight and backdrivable knee exoskeleton. The mitigation of discomfort is treated as mechanical design and control issues and three…
To enable the broad adoption of wearable robotic exoskeletons in medical and industrial settings, it is crucial they can adaptively support large repertoires of movements. We propose a new human-machine interface to simultaneously drive…
We introduce optimal energy shaping as an enhancement of classical passivity-based control methods. A promising feature of passivity theory, alongside stability, has traditionally been claimed to be intuitive performance tuning along the…
In this study, we present a feedforward control system designed for active gravity compensation on an upper body exoskeleton. The system utilizes only positional data from internal motor sensors to calculate torque, employing analytical…
Flexible octopus arms exhibit an exceptional ability to coordinate large numbers of degrees of freedom and perform complex manipulation tasks. As a consequence, these systems continue to attract the attention of biologists and roboticists…
This paper presents design and control innovations of wearable robots that tackle two barriers to widespread adoption of powered exoskeletons, namely restriction of human movement and versatile control of wearable co-robot systems. First,…
The sit-to-stand movement is a key feature for wide adoption of powered lower limb orthoses for patients with complete paraplegia. In this paper we study the control of the ascending phase of the sit-to-stand movement for a minimally…
Exoskeleton locomotion must be robust while being adaptive to different users with and without payloads. To address these challenges, this work introduces a data-driven predictive control (DDPC) framework to synthesize walking gaits for…
Haptic upper limb exoskeletons are robots that assist human operators during task execution while having the ability to render virtual or remote environments. Therefore, the stability of such robots in physical human-robot-environment…
An exoskeleton is a wearable electromechanical structure that is intended to resemble and allow movements in a manner similar to the human skeletal system. They can be used by both disabled and able people alike to increase physical…
This paper presents an application of the energy shaping methodology to control a flexible, elastic Cosserat rod model of a single octopus arm. The novel contributions of this work are two-fold: (i) a control-oriented modeling of the…
Human walkers traverse diverse environments and demonstrate different gait locomotion and energy cost on granular terrains compared to solid ground. We present a stiffness-based model predictive control approach of knee exoskeleton…
This paper compares three controllers for quasi-passive exoskeletons. The Utility Maximizing Controller (UMC) uses intent estimation to recognize user motions and decision theory to activate the support mechanism. The intent estimation…
Exoskeletons which amplify the strength of their operators can enable heavy-duty manipulation of unknown objects. However, this type of behavior is difficult to accomplish; it requires the exoskeleton to sense and amplify the operator's…
Back-support exoskeletons have been proposed to mitigate spinal loading in industrial handling, yet their effectiveness critically depends on timely and context-aware assistance. Most existing approaches rely either on load-estimation…