Haptic sensation has two complex components; skin (cutaneous) sensing which is mediated by a variety of sensing organs that respond to pressure, vibration, displacement and temperature and kinaesthetic/proprioceptive sensing (muscles and joints) which responds to motions and forces exerted by the interaction of the body with the external environment. Although haptic interaction has been identified as being crucial for many applications, achieving realism in haptic feedback has not been possible due to physical, understanding and modelling problems. This paper explores the sensation of touch from a physiological and technological perspective and shows how this can be combined with an integrated touch/force reflecting system to produce a `realistic’ haptic rendering.

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Intensive repetitive therapy shows promise to improve motor function and quality of life for stroke patients. Intense therapies provided by individualized interaction between the patient and rehabilitation specialist to overcome upper extremity impairment are beneficial, however, they are expensive and difficult to evaluate quantitatively and objectively. The development of a pneumatic muscle (PM) driven therapeutic device, the RUPERT™ has the potential of providing a low cost and safe take-home method of supplementing therapy in addition to in the clinic treatment. The device can also provide real-time, objective assessment of functional improvement from the therapy.

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A power assist walking leg is designed for enhancing strength and endurance during walking, it can be also applied to one whose legs are injured or who has difficulty in walking because of aging, paralysis and amputation. In this paper, we intend to introduce a concept of power assist walking support system and its fundamental control strategy using the information of human-robot interaction force. The whole system must be simple for user, i.e. the user can manipulate the walking support system easily. In order to make the system work smoothly, it must understand the user’s intent through human-robot interaction force and the joint angle. Therefore, we propose tentatively a strategy using human-robot interaction force between the assist walking exoskeletonand human legs. Correlative experimental results show the effectiveness of the control strategies.

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Upper limbs of human beings are extremely special and significant, which obtain crucial function to achieve manipulations intelligently and dexterously. Gesture-Changeable Under-Actuated (GCUA) grasping function is presented to improve the capability of robotic hands to achieve humanoid manipulations with low dependence on control and sensor feedback systems, which includes tradi-tional under-actuated (UA) grasping motion and special prebending (PB) motion. Based on GCUA function, GCUA Hand II is developed, which has 5 fingers and 14 DOF. All the fingers use similar tendon mechanisms and motors to achieve GCUA function. With GCUA Hand II, a humanoid robot upper limb system is designed, which has two 3-DOF arms actuated by stepper motors and two 14-DOF hands actuated by DC motors. The control system includes four parts: a computer, a FPGA motion controller, a driver module, and a user module, which can control the upper limb system to do various movements dexterously and exactly. With C++ language, a spatial motion program is designed to assist researchers to determine spatial motions of the upper limb system. This system has a great prospect in the field of rehabilitation engineering, extremely environmental manipulation, humanoid robotics and social services.

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One of the principal guidelines in the design of haptic devices is to provide a suitable mechanical design that can improve control performance and the force-feedback fidelity. Unfortunately these guidelines may conflict with other design objectives (reflected mass, balancing, dexterity) as well as with specifications given by users and applications. For haptic interfaces based on tendon driven actuation it is highly important to achieve an accurate model of friction losses in the transmission system, in order to be able to compensate for them through an active control. In this paper it is reported a method for modeling and control complex tendon transmissions used for driving haptic devices and robots. The presented approach can operate in realtime with very low complexity; it is applicable to all kinds of serial manipulators and provides enough flexibility to allow identification of parameters and modeling of distributed friction phenomena all along the transmission. The approach has been implemented and tested on a 4 DOF exoskeleton system, the PERCRO L-EXOS.

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