Synopsis

Context

With the current environmental and social situations, more research focuses on mechatronic/robotic structures that include physical interactions with Humans at its center. Applications are numerous such as 5.0 Industry (safer, equal access, and better conditions), and medical applications (robotic-assisted surgery, rehabilitation, and assistance). In these fields, researchers designed mechatronic/robotic devices to enhance human healthcare and ensure patient safety.
One main challenge is to ensure smooth and safe interactions along the whole body of the device and not only at a specific point. To tackle this challenge:

  • One can equip standard rigid systems with redundant sensors and implement advanced control laws. However, their structure, sensors’ characteristics, and number of actuators limit the results.
  • One can consider hyper-redundant (a.e. snake robot), under-actuated, or compliant structures (a.e. soft exoskeleton or manipulators). They can adapt passively to humans while keeping simple control laws. Yet, those apparent simplifications of interaction management come with other challenges. For example, Hyper-redundant structures need to be represented by many states whose non-commandability often leads to under-actuation with bifurcation/singularity phenomena and equilibrium multiplicity.

 The extreme case of continuum deformable structures leads even to control systems defined by non-linear partial differential equations. Controlling structures’ shape for body-human interactions requires one to choose which states to actuate for a given task, which is not trivial.
Finally, the devices’ inherent safety due to their design is still an open question. Indeed, it only works if their passive compliance is higher than the compliance of the environments in contact.

Through this workshop, we would like to animate discussions on how deformable structures can be used in mechatronic and robotic devices to improve their interactions with humans. In particular, the goal is to analyze the advantages, opportunities, and drawbacks brought by the strong coupling between their design and control for such a task.

Continuum robots and mechatronics devices. From left to right: cable driven serial continuum robot interacting passively with a human hand [1], pneumatic soft rehabilitation glove [2], smart deformable skin equipped with strain, temperature, and humidity sensors [3].

Topics of interest

This workshop covers several topics about continuum mechatronics for interaction, collaboration and assistance, some of them are listed below:

  • Design of continuum mechatronic structures.
  • Sensor integration in continuum structures for human interactions.
  • Control laws.
  • Active material interactions.
  • Co-manipulation with Human.
  • Human motion analysis for interaction.
  • Contact-based control with Human.
  • Active and collaborative exoskeleton.
  • Physical Human-Continuum robot Interaction and collaboration.

Bibliography

[1] Amanov, E., Nguyen, T. D., & Burgner-Kahrs, J. (2021). Tendon-driven continuum robots with extensible sections—A model-based evaluation of path-following motions. The International Journal of Robotics Research, 40(1), 7-23.

[2] Polygerinos, P., Lyne, S., Wang, Z., Nicolini, L. F., Mosadegh, B., Whitesides, G. M., & Walsh, C. J. (2013, November). Towards a soft pneumatic glove for hand rehabilitation. In 2013 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (pp. 1512-1517). IEEE.

[3] Hartmann, F., Baumgartner, M., & Kaltenbrunner, M. (2021). Becoming sustainable, the new frontier in soft robotics. Advanced Materials, 33(19), 2004413.