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Teleimpedance Control: Overview and Application

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Human and Robot Hands

Part of the book series: Springer Series on Touch and Haptic Systems ((SSTHS))

Abstract

In previous chapters, human hand and arm kinematics have been analyzed through a synergstic approach and the underlying concepts were used to design robotic systems and devise simplified control algorithms. On the other hand, it is well-known that synergies can be studied also at a muscular level as a coordinated activation of multiple muscles acting as a single unit to generate different movements. As a result, muscular activations, quantified through Electromyography (EMG) signals can be then processed and used as direct inputs to external devices with a large number of DOFs. In this chapter, we present a minimalistic approach based on tele-impedance control, where EMGs from only one pair of antagonistic muscle pair are used to map the users postural and stiffness references to the synergy-driven anthropomorphic robotic hand, described in Chap. 7. In this direction, we first provide an overview of the teleimpedance control concept which forms the basis for the development of the hand controller. Eventually, experimental results evaluate the effectiveness of the teleimpedance control concept in execution of the tasks which require significant dynamics variation or are executed in remote environments with dynamic uncertainties.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Teleimpedance control concept has also been used for assistive control of a knee exoskeleton device [28, 29]. The proposed controller captures the user’s intent to generate task-related assistive torques by means of the exoskeleton while performing daily tasks.

  2. 2.

    It is important to note here that this model only takes into account the effect of muscular co-contractions in endpoint stiffness modulations. As regards the role of arm configuration in endpoint stiffness geometry in teleimpedance control, readers may refer to [3].

  3. 3.

    The existence of a right inverse is guaranteed by the fact that in nonsingular configurations \(T_F\) is full row-rank. Because \(n > 3\), there exist infinite right-inverses: a particular choice is for instance \(T_F^{+}={T}_{{F}}^{{T}}({T}_{{F}}{T}_{{F}}^{{T}})^{-1}\), i.e. the pseudoinverse of \(T_F\).

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Advanced Robotics, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Via Morego 30, 16163, Genoa, Italy

    Arash Ajoudani, Sasha B. Godfrey & Nikos Tsagarakis

  2. Research Center “E. Piaggio”, Università di Pisa, Pisa, Italy

    Antonio Bicchi

Authors
  1. Arash Ajoudani
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  2. Sasha B. Godfrey
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  3. Nikos Tsagarakis
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  4. Antonio Bicchi
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Arash Ajoudani .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Advanced Robotics, Italian Institute of Technology, Genova, Genova, Italy

    Matteo Bianchi

  2. Department of Cognitive Neuriscience, University of Bielefeld, Bielefeld, Germany

    Alessandro Moscatelli

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Ajoudani, A., Godfrey, S.B., Tsagarakis, N., Bicchi, A. (2016). Teleimpedance Control: Overview and Application. In: Bianchi, M., Moscatelli, A. (eds) Human and Robot Hands. Springer Series on Touch and Haptic Systems. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-26706-7_10

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-26706-7_10

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-26705-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-26706-7

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