An Enhanced Robot Massage System in Smart Homes Using Force Sensing and a Dynamic Movement Primitive

Abstract

With requirements to improve life quality, smart homes, and healthcare have gradually become a future lifestyle. In particular, service robots with human behavioral sensing for private or personal use in the home have attracted a lot of research attention thanks to their advantages in relieving high labor costs and the fatigue of human assistance. In this paper, a novel force-sensing-and robotic learning algorithm-based teaching interface for robot massaging has been proposed. For the teaching purposes, a human operator physically holds the end-effector of the robot to perform the demonstration. At this stage, the end position data are outputted and sent to be segmented via the Finite Difference (FD) method. A Dynamic Movement Primitive (DMP) is utilized to model and generalize the human-like movements. In order to learn from multiple demonstrations, Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) is used for the preprocessing of the data recorded on the robot platform, and a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) is employed for the evaluation of DMP to generate multiple patterns after the completion of the teaching process. After that, a Gaussian Mixture Regression (GMR) algorithm is applied to generate a synthesized trajectory to minimize position errors. Then a hybrid position/force controller is integrated to track the desired trajectory in the task space while considering the safety of human-robot interaction. The validation of our proposed method has been performed and proved by conducting massage tasks on a KUKA LBR iiwa robot platform.

Using a Robot to Treat Non-specific Low Back Pain: Results From a Two-Arm, Single-Blinded, Randomized Controlled Trial

“…The use of robotic devices to perform therapeutic massages has been previously reported (Wang et al, 2018 ; Li et al, 2020 ). The main difference of the ADAMO robot with other versions is that the massage is produced by a directed current of compressed air with constant intensity.…”

“…The main problem in measuring and reporting manual massage practices is that the massage is applied by different therapists, with different strength and intensity, which may vary from session to session (Farber and Wieland, 2016 ). The use of massaging robotic devices should solve all these problems and several prototypes have been proposed (Wang et al, 2018 ; Li et al, 2020 ).…”

An intelligent control system for robot massaging with uncertain skin characteristics

“…When robots are performing massage applications, the end effector of the robot contacts with a certain area (position) of human skin, and contact force are usually required to be controlled at a suitable level (Huang et al , 2014; Luo et al , 2014; Wen et al , 2019; Dometios et al , 2018; Ando et al , 2013). Impedance control, as a compliance control of force and position, has been applied in massage, physiotherapy and other industries (Luo et al , 2016; Luo and Hsieh, 2018; Li et al , 2020). The stability and accuracy of impedance control are directly affected by environmental mechanics.…”

Robotic Manipulation Planning for Automatic Peeling of Glass Substrate Based on Online Learning Model Predictive Path Integral

“…The salient feature of the contact-rich manipulation task is that the robot or the tool at the end of the robot will remain in contact with the environment during the process. Such tasks are very common, such as assembly tasks (such as peg-in-hole task [ 4 ]) and material removal tasks (such as grinding [ 5 ], digging [ 6 ]) in the production environment, as well as glass cleaning [ 7 ], massage [ 8 ] and other tasks in life. There are mainly two kinds of ways for contact-rich manipulation tasks, namely, planning-based and learning-based.…”