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Compact rehabilitation robot system which can support movement of the wrist of patients has been developed. The robot system can detect and analyze the patient's intention to move the wrist by such a biological signal as muscle potential, then, assist the wrist exercise of patients. Also, both-wrist rehabilitation robot system by mirror effect has been successfully developed for practical use in the hospital and at home. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes quick and stable standing and sitting motion of an inverted pendulum type robot by whole-body motion including force control. The whole-body motion is achieved by controlling composite center of gravity of the robot, and damping force control of a wrist-roller is employed to assure the stability of inverted pendulum control on a contact situation with the ground. Motion planning of standing and sitting based on the proposed control method is also proposed. Standing and sitting motion using the proposed motion control and motion planning is simulated with a dynamic simulator, ODE (Open Dynamics Engine). From the simulation results, it was confirmed that the robot successively realized the standing and sitting motion quickly and stably. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human characteristics are supposed to be applied to the control systems of the human-friendly robots. Therefore, it is important to know the human characteristics in human-robot cooperative tasks. In this study, we considered a single rotational degree of freedom experimental system as well as a mass-spring-damper-friction dynamic model for the human arm, measured the torque acting on the armload from subject's forearm and the angular displacement of subject's forearm using the force sensor and the eddy current sensor, analyzed their mutual relation, and attained the characteristics of the human arm with the effect of the gravity load. We compared this cooperative motion to that studied without the gravity load and found that the damping and friction characteristics remained unchanged and the spring characteristics disappeared. In this case, the characteristics of the follower's arm had no relationship with the weight of the load. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A robot manipulator control method using an electromyogram (EMG) from a human face is proposed. The robot has a three-degree-of-freedom arm with an end effector installed on the tip of the robot. The amplitude of the EMG signal generated from the masseter, a jaw muscle, is used to control the robot hand velocity and to grasp the object. The difference of the EMG level between right and left masseter determines the hand's direction of movement. The open-close control of the robot hand is activated by detecting double clenches performed within 0.6 s. Low-pass filters of two kinds are applied to the measured EMG to enable reliable and effortless control of the velocity and grasping task. Picking, transferring, and placing of a brick object are performed. The effectiveness of the proposed method was verified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]