Bilateral Control in the Vertical Direction Using Functional Electrical Stimulation

Abstract

In this study, we investigated bilateral control in the vertical direction using functional electrical stimulation (FES). Bilateral control is a remote operation technique that incorporates force feedback. This technology has potential applications in everyday life, including allowing medical doctors to make diagnoses or friends to communicate using tactile sensations when far apart. However, current iterations of this technology require robot arms to be worn. This is undesirable as such arms are heavy, and arms with multi degree-of-freedom are difficult to produce. To address these problems, we investigated bilateral control using FES. However, in previous studies, which applied FES to bilateral control, control in the vertical direction and the effect of reaction forces were not investigated. In this study, we verified that vertical control is achievable. First, the movements of a human operator were shown to follow those of another operator in the vertical direction, demonstrating that vertical bilateral control using FES is effective. We next investigated whether an operator could recognize when the partner was holding a weight. This experiment demonstrated that the operator was able to recognize the presence or absence of the weight in the hand of the partner. However, shaking was observed in the arms of the master and slave. We believe that this problem can be eliminated by estimating the reaction forces of arms.

Bilateral Control of Elbow and Shoulder Joints Using Functional Electrical Stimulation Between Humans and Robots

“…In contrast, bilateral control is a control method of sending a command value in bi-direction between a master and a slave. Accordingly, the master can feel the external force applied to the slave, thereby simulating the sensation that the master's body has become the slave [13], [22]. In this study, we used position-symmetrical bilateral control because its control system is simple, stable, and does not require a force sensor [23].…”

“…FES can provide a richer tactile sensation because the deep sensations can be transmitted through it. Thus, we attempted to solve this problem by incorporating FES into the master system [11]- [13].…”

A New Autoregressive Neural Network Model with Command Compensation for Imitation Learning Based on Bilateral Control

“…We propose bilateral control-based imitation learning as a method of using force information [14]- [16]. Bilateral control is a teleoperation method where a human operates the master robot and the slave robot performs tasks in the workspace [17]- [20]. During this period, position synchronization and presentation of the reaction forces are simultaneously executed.…”

Bilateral Control of Two Finger Joints Using Functional Electrical Stimulation

“…Tamaki et al controlled hands using FES; they showed that it was possible to use hands to help play a musical instrument [13]; they used FES to move their fingers and tried to reproduce the object's gripping motion by performing closed-loop control using a force sensor [14]. Kitamura et al performed bilateral control of an elbow joint using FES [15]. These various studies indicate that FES is useful for control.…”