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Wearable robots pose high risks to humans because they are directly mounted on human bodies, and methods for assessing their safety have not yet been established. For developing such safety tests, we have fabricated dummy legs that emulate the structure of the human body. Furthermore, all mechanical characteristics of human tissues that relate to their interactions with a wearable robot — elasticity,...
As a representation of muscle activation dynamics, electromyograms (EMG) signals can reflect muscle contraction status. The status has some relationship with body movements under certain circumstance. This paper is aimed at upper limb elbow joint continuous prediction using EMG signals. Unlike the conventional pattern recognition method, a more quantitative relationship between EMG signals and joint...
A new cable-driven soft endoscopic system is designed for cardiac ablation in a minimally invasive manner in this paper. The system is totally made of soft materials and has no rigid structures inside. In order to perform operation in the limited pericardium, a modified behavior-based control method inspired from animals is applied in this system. Experiments are performed to demonstrate the concept...
This paper focuses on output properties of cellular artificial actuator. The actuator is built from small actuator cells with structural elasticity. These cells are connected together in series to form fibers, which are in turn connected in parallel to form the whole actuator. These cells are controlled to determine whether to be in a contracted, or ON, state or a relaxed, or OFF, state. Arranging...
Pumps capable of transporting high-viscosity fluids and solid-liquid mixtures are essential for emergency situations. Today, those pumps that can transport high-viscosity fluids and solid-liquid mixtures centralize pressure at one point and convey a fluid, the size of those pumps also becomes large to put high pressure, and the point that we can set is limited. We have previously developed a peristaltic...
Biological research has concluded that the actuation of the spine contributes significantly to the performance of quadrupeds in terms of controlling body posture, and integrating limbs and trunk actions. Inspired by this biological findings, we develop a pneumatically-driven quadruped robot called Renny with configurable spine morphology to study how the spine contributes to cheetah-like running....
Neurological examinations are among the most important clinical skills to identify disorders in the neurological system at early stages. Training on neurological examination for inexperienced doctors plays an important role in improving accuracy of diagnosis. Such training programs have been conducted until now using physical simulators or simulated patients (SPs). However, conventional simulators...
In contrast to the high movement adaptability of quadruped animals in many environmental conditions, it is hard for conventional quadruped robots to operate in complex environment conditions. We investigate the adaptability of animals' musculo-skeletal systems, by building a bio-inspired quadruped robot named ”Pneupard” which duplicates a feline musculo-skeletal system. In this study, we built Pneupard's...
Although robotic locomotion have greatly advanced over the past years, the abyss that separates such locomotion from even the simplest animal locomotions prompt us to approach robotic locomotion taking cues from animals. The animal musculoskeletal structure, often ignored by roboticists due to its high redundancy and complexity, might hold the secret for self-stable locomotion observed in bipeds and...
The Pneumatic Artificial Muscle (PAM) provides many advantages over conventional actuators, especially pneumatic cylinders. It provides light weight, simple structure, high output force to weight ratio, low cost and so on. Despite of these advantages, there are also challenges in using a PAM actuator, such as the behavior of nonlinearity and high hysteresis. To get optimum design and usage, it is...
Muscle forces modeling and computation around the elbow are focused on in this paper when the elbow flexing and extending in the sagittal plane. The paper introduces a Rehabilitation Intelligent Training System (RITS) for restoration of motor function. The system has advantages of small size, less weight and interaction during the rehabilitation process. Furthermore, this system mainly consists of...
As the impedance profiles of the human joints vary substantially during motion, the employment of variable impedance systems into exoskeletons, orthoses and prostheses that will be able to produce human-like mechanics could have significant benefits. In this direction, this manuscript presents a generic technique to estimate active joint stiffness based on an EMG-driven musculoskeletal model whose...
It is challenging to design a humanoid robot control framework that maintains high-level motion performance in an unknown environment as this requires complicated sensing capabilities and time-consuming process. On the other hand, basic autonomous motion control in joint space is relatively easier and faster to fulfil dynamic tasks. Based on modeling of human muscles, this paper proposes a biological...
In order to investigate the feasibility of integrating functional electrical stimulation (FES) with robot-based rehabilitation training, this paper proposes an FES-assisted training strategy combined with impedance control for our self-made exoskeleton lower limb rehabilitation robot. This control strategy is carried out in a leg press task. Through impedance control, an active compliance of the robot...
We present a novel bionic eye based on spherical ultrasonic motor (SUSM). SUSM is a compact mechanism occupying little space but good responsiveness, high positioning accuracy, high torque at low speed and strong magnetic field compatibility. With those advantages, the bionic eye easily implements some human eye movements. It is constructed from an eyeball, three driving stators, three preloaded apparatuses...
Endotracheal Intubation (ETI) is a common airway procedure used to connect the larynx and the lungs through the windpipe of patients under emergency situations. The process is carried out by a laryngoscope inserted into the mouth, and helps doctors in viewing the glottis and inserting the tube. In 2012, we developed a humanoid robot for ETI training, called WKA-5R, which was able to simulate various...
A variable stiffness actuator is proposed according to the human ergonomic joint actuation mechanism and applied to an elbow rehabilitation robot. The robot employs an antagonistic compliant driving actuation to ensure rehabilitation training effectiveness and the patient's safety even under the condition of spasm. The robot joint stiffness and position can be controlled simultaneously by using the...
To solve the problems of conventional signal analysis methods about non-stationary and frequency characteristics of surface electromyogrphy (sEMG) is of great significance to rehabilitation robot control with EMG-based human-computer interfaces (HCI). In this paper, the latent process models of sEMG signals were developed based on the combination of time-varying auto-regression (TVAR) model and dynamic...
To improve the living conditions of the amputees, researchers have made various sEMG prosthetic hands. The recognition method of sEMG influences the performance of prosthetic hands greatly. Taking the advantages but mediate the disadvantages of previous studies, this paper puts forward a pattern recognition method to recognize the sEMG signals fast and steadily. This method combines the conventional...
This paper presents a design and development of Veress Needle Insertion Force Sensing System, and a Veress Needle Insertion Robotic System for acquiring force data for soft tissue insertion. The study reports force data from veress needle insertions, measured to use in our Robot-Assisted Surgical System. The main goal of this work is to develop a virtual reality robotic surgical system which can provide...
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