Cooperative Assistive Robotic Systems with Haptic Feedback: Sensing and Control

With the need to accomplish more complicated work by robots, increasing attention has been paid to cooperative assistive robotics systems and technologies over the past decades. The proposed work on sensing, control and optimization of cooperative assistive robotic systems addresses one of the recognized major challenges and opportunities for control researchers. The results of the research will lay the ground work for the development of cooperative robotic systems with potential applications in industrial manufacturing, military applications, environmental monitoring, transportation, space exploration, medical applications and health care services. The results of the proposed research will help the industry to offer operating convenience and increase economic efficiency, as well as offer benefit to people required medical interventions and physical assistance. Cooperative robotic systems have advantages over a single robot, such as increased dexterity, improved handling capability, increased loading capacity and enhanced robustness due to redundancy. Much existing work lacks a good framework for coordination strategies due to the complexity of the whole system. The integration of two key components, sensing and control, is not optimized and needs co-design for specific applications. The issues related to unknown environment model, dynamics, coordination mechanism to dynamic environment, imperfect sensors, communication constraints, and performance evaluation index have not been well addressed.

The short term objectives of the proposed research are: to develop assistive robotic platforms with haptic feedback for manufacturing, medical applications and rehabilitation respectively, as well as sensing based motion control in the existence of limited measurement, uncertainties and disturbances; to propose numerous cooperative control strategies for multiple assistive robots for cooperative tasks in which a single robot is not enough to accomplish dexterous tasks, as well as to define performance indices in evaluating how to reach cooperative agreement, to optimize the useful information for feedback from multiple sources subject to communication constraints, and to address the robustness and synthesis issues among the multiple robotic systems.

Specifically, the following issues are to be investigated: 1) Assistive robotic systems with haptic feedback - sensing and motion control; 2) Cooperative control of multi-assistive robotic systems with haptic feedback. Specifically, three applications will be investigated: i) Cooperative mobile manipulators; ii) Cooperative surgical robotic devices for tasks in confined workspace with haptic feedback; iii) Cooperative wearable exoskeleton robotic devices for rehabilitation.