Biomechatronics: Biomechanics and Motor Control from humans to robots and back

The Biorobotics Institute will hold the next Seminar on Friday, January 22, 2016. Arturo Forner-Cordero, Head of the Biomechatronics Laboratory, Mechatronics Department at the Escola Politécnica da Universidade de Sao Paulo, Brasil, will present “Biomechatronics: Biomechanics and  Motor Control from humans to robots and back”.

Abstract

Knowledge of the human biomechanics and motor control mechanisms is crucial for the design of robots that interact directly with humans, such as assistive or rehabilitation robots.

In the design of a rehabilitation robot, aspects such as movement variability, soft mechanical interaction, impedance control and subject involvement in the task have to be considered in order to promote rehabilitation and learning. In this presentation two examples of this problem, one for the upper and another for the lower limb will be presented.

The design of an exoskeleton to assist upper limb rehabilitation has to consider biomechanical requirements, such as joint angles and torques as well as motor control aspects, in order to generate the correct cooperative behavior. Can mechanical perturbations improve the motor learning of a coincident timing task?

Another example of lower limb exoskeleton design would be to generate smooth trajectories that keep a biped stability criterion. In this respect, the design of a robotic exoskeleton to assist gait encounters some challenges that are similar to the design of a biped robot. In this work we present an example analyzing two gait tasks and comparing them to robot design: an obstacle crossing task and a perturbation of rhythm paced by a metronome. Each task reflects a different aspect of human gait robustness across a variety of conditions and is an example for the design of walking robots and lower limb exoskeletons.