Acta Medica Okayama1996Application of rubber artificial muscle manipulator as a rehabilitation robot112117ENToshiroNoritsuguToshihiroTanakaTakashiYamanaka<p>The application of robot to rehabilitation has become a matter of great concern. This study deals with an exercise for restoration of function being one of important rehabilitation tasks. An exercise of single joint has already been achieved with some automatically controlled machines. Now, the multijoint exercise becomes desirable, which requires the exercise robot with multi ple degrees of freedom to generate more realistic motion pattern. This kind of robot has to be absolutely safe for humans. A pneumatic calculator may be so effective for such a robot because of the flexibility from air compressibility that a rubber artificial muscle manipulator pneumatically driven is applied to construct the exercise robot with two degrees of freedom. Also an impedance control strategy is employed to realize various exercise motion modes. Further, an identification method of the recovery condition is proposed to execute the effective rehabilitation. Some experiments show the availability of proposed rehabilitation robot system </p>
No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.Acta Medica Okayama1996Master assisted cooperative control of human and robot121126ENToshiroNoritsuguHiroyukiInoue<p>A cooperative control approach between human and robot takes an important role to carry out various tasks in hazardous environments or space. In this case, a robot is operated based on the cooperation between direct human control and autonomous robot control. In this study, a neural network is introduced for cooperating process between human control and robot control in order to optimize the degree of cooperation of human and robot. The degree of participation of human operator into the control is determined based on a reference cooperative model which expresses desired human and robot cooperative form. The experiment has executed the contacting tasks for the various object walls using a two-degrees of freedom Cartesian robot. The results indicate the availability of the proposed cooperating method for the cooperative control of human and robot </p>
No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.