Slacking prevention during assistive contour following tasks with guaranteed coupled stability

Passive velocity field control is advantageous to deliver human-in-the-loop contour tracking rehabilitation exercises, since patients can be allowed to proceed with their preferred pace, while assistance can still be provided as determined by the therapist with ensured coupled stability. We introduce a framework based on passive velocity field control for robot assisted rehabilitation that includes prevention mechanisms against undesired slacking behavior of patients. This framework not only provides systematic approaches to prevent slacking, but also can do so while ensuring coupled stability of the overall robot patient system, a property that cannot be assured with any of the other ad-hoc slacking prevention methods. In particular, the proposed approach enables seamless on-line modification of the task difficulty, speed of contour following, and the level of assistance, while preserving passivity of the system with respect to external forces. The proposed slacking prevention schemes encourage active participation of the patients in rehabilitation protocols with even increased number of repetitions and thanks to flexibility introduced by the controller, render delivery of “repetitive tasks without repeating the same task” possible. Experiments with an haptic interface are included to demonstrate the passivity of the proposed control framework and preliminary human subject experiments with healthy volunteers are presented to validate feasibility and usability of the proposed approaches.