This paper describes the technical principles of a high-performance force controlled robot, called the HapticMaster. It is designed as a generic platform for applications with human interaction. Therefore, it differs significantly from most industrial robots on the one hand, whereas it also differs from most haptic interfaces on the other hand due to its power. An admittance control paradigm is used, which facilitates a high joint stiffness in combination with high force sensitivity. Typical applications for the HapticMaster are found in virtual reality, haptics research, and robot rehabilitation.

In this paper, a new hand and wrist exoskeleton design, the SCRIPT Passive Orthosis (SPO), for the rehabilitation after stroke is presented. The SPO is a wrist, hand, and finger orthosis that assists individuals after stroke that suffer from impairments caused by spasticity and abnormal synergies. These impairments are characterized in the wrist and hand by excessive involuntary flexion torques that make the hand unable to be used for many activities in daily life. The SPO can passively offset these undesired torques, but it cannot actively generate or control movements. The user needs to use voluntary muscle activation to perform movements and thus needs to have some residual muscle control to successfully use the SPO. The SPO offsets the excessive internal flexion by applying external extension torques to the joints of the wrist and fingers. The SPO physically interacts with the users using the forearm shell, the hand plate and the digit caps from the Saebo Flex, but is otherwise a completely novel design. It applies the external extension torques via passive leaf springs and elastic tension cords. The amount of this support can be adjusted to provide more or less offset force to wrist, finger, or thumb extension, manually. The SPO is equipped with sensors that can give a rough estimate of the joint rotations and applied torques, sufficient to make the orthosis interact with our interactive gaming environment. Integrated inertial and gyroscopic sensors provide limited information on the user's forearm posture. The first home-based patient experiences have already let to several issues being resolved, but have also made it clear that many improvement are still to be made.

Haptics is an emerging technology that allows touch‐enabled interaction with virtual objects. Analogous to the use of computer graphics for rendering of a three‐dimensional (3D) scene to give the user a visual description of the scene, it is possible to use computer haptics to let the user touch objects in the 3D scene. This is normally accomplished by having the haptics engine sending either force vectors or positional information to a haptics device, a robotic arm, that the user manipulates. The purpose of this paper is to give an overview of this technology, describe haptic devices and haptic application programming interfaces. We will also illustrate the use of haptics technology by describing a few industrial and medical applications.

The pathophysiological assessment of joint properties and voluntary motion in neurological patients remains a challenge. This is typically the case in cerebellar patients, who exhibit dysmetric movements due to the dysfunction of cerebellar circuitry. Several tools have been developed, but so far most of these tools have remained confined to laboratories, with a lack of standardization. We report on a new device which combines the use of electromyographic (EMG) sensors with haptic technology for the dynamic investigation of wrist properties. The instrument is composed of a drivetrain, a haptic controller and a signal acquisition unit. Angular accuracy is 0.00611 rad, nominal torque is 6 N·m, maximal rotation velocity is 34.907 rad/sec, with a range of motion of −1.0472 to +1.0472 rad. The inertia of the motor and handgrip is 0.004 kg·m2. This is the first standardized myohaptic instrument allowing the dynamic characterization of wrist properties, including under the condition of artificial damping. We show that cerebellar patients are unable to adapt EMG activities when faced with an increase in damping while performing fast reversal movements. The instrument allows the extraction of an electrophysiological signature of a cerebellar deficit.

Upper limb postural tremor consists of mechanical-reflex and central-neurogenic oscillations, superimposed upon a background of irregular fluctuations in muscle force. Muscle spindles play key-roles in the information flow to supra-spinal and spinal generators. Oscillations were delivered using a new generation portable myohaptic device, called ldquowristalyzer,rdquo taking into account the ergonomy of upper limbs and allowing a fine adjustment to each configuration of upper limb segments. The nominal torque of the first generation device is 4 Nm, with a maximal rotation velocity of 300 degrees/s and a range of motion of plusmn45 degrees. Reliability was assessed in basal condition and during loading conditions. We assessed the effects of the addition of inertia on postural tremor of the finger in a group of 26 neurological patients and the effects of wrist oscillations upon contralateral postural tremor in 6 control subjects and in 7 neurological patients exhibiting a postural tremor. Patients showed two different behaviors in response to inertia and exhibited an increased variability of postural tremor during fast oscillations (13.3 Hz). One patient with overactivity of the olivocerebellar pathways exhibited a drop in the peak frequency of more than 20%. The relative power of the 8-12 Hz subband was significantly higher in controls both in basal condition and during oscillations (p = 0.028 and p = 0.015, respectively). The second generation wristalyzer allows to investigate the effects of mechanical oscillations up to frequency of 50 Hz. This mechatronic device can assess the responsiveness of tremor generators to stimulation of muscle spindles and biomechanical loading. Potential applications are the monitoring of dysmetria under various inertial or damping conditions, the assessment of rigidity in Parkinson's disease and the characterization of voluntary muscle force.

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In an admittance-controlled haptic device, input forces are used to calculate the movement of the device. Although developers try to minimize delays, there will always be delays between the applied force and the corresponding movement in such systems, which might affect what the user of the device perceives. In this experiment we tested whether these delays in a haptic human-robot interaction influence the perception of mass. In the experiment an admittance-controlled manipulator was used to simulate various masses. In a staircase design subjects had to decide which of two virtual masses was heavier after gently pushing them leftward with the right hand in mid-air (no friction, no gravity). The manipulator responded as quickly as possible or with an additional delay (25 or 50 ms) to the forces exerted by the subject on the handle of the haptic device. The perceived mass was ~10% larger for a delay of 25 ms and ~20% larger for a delay of 50 ms. Based on these results, we estimated that the delays that are present in nowadays admittance-controlled haptic devices (up to 20ms) will give an increase in perceived mass which is smaller than the Weber fraction for mass (~10% for inertial mass). Additional analyses showed that the subjects’ decision on mass when the perceptual differences were small did not correlate with intuitive variables such as force, velocity or a combination of these, nor with any other measured variable, suggesting that subjects did not have a consistent strategy during guessing or used other sources of information, for example the efference copy of their pushes.

For interactive humanoids, rehabilitation robots, and orthotic and prosthetic devices, the human-robot interaction is an essential but challenging element. Compliant Series-Elastic Actuators (SEAs) are ideal to power such devices due to their low impedance and smoothness of generated forces. In this paper we present the ServoSEA, which is a miniature Series-Elastic Actuator (SEA) based on cheap RC servos, and which is useful for actuation of orthotic, prosthetic or robotic hands. RC servos are complete packages that come with rotary motor and sensor and have an integrated control board to control the output angle. In the ServoSEA, a small rotational spring is attached to the output shaft and the internal rotary sensor is relocated to measure the spring deflection. These small modifications immediately make the integrated control board behave as a series-elastic torque controller. Here we present several design alternatives and report on the performance of our implementation that will be used in the active SCRIPT wrist and hand orthosis. The performance measurements showed that feedforward control of the example implementation of the ServoSEA results in acceptable, though not perfect, force tracking behavior. It is clear that although the ServoSEA concept is universal, final performance strongly depends on the quality of the original RC servo.