Sharif Digital Repository

One of the recent studies in the field of humanoid robots is to achieve a robot gait close to the human-like gait. Therefore, using the foot equipped with passive or active toe joint is developed in case of robots. The results of several studies show that the segmented foot with a toe joint has several advantages compared to the rigid foot in: walking speed, range of joint angle and ability to kneel and climb higher steps. Both passive and active toe joints of humanoid robots are developed. Advantages of the passive toe joint is obvious; in terms of design, it is more simple and light. Moreover, in normal gait, when the robot is equipped with passive toe joint, body inertial causes an... 

With advancements in control and robotics technology, wearable robots have gained multiple applications in rehabilitation and power augmentation. In robots developed for power augmentation purposes, human decisions are combined with robot power to enhance the human ability to perform various activities, such as carrying heavy loads and walking for a long time. In cases where robots are designed to help humans to carry heavy loads, the robot control strategy should minimize the human-robot interaction forces. In this case, heavy loads influence the robot and the user no longer need to use more energy than normal walking, and the robot works following human intentions. Where the robot works to... 

Exoskeletons, or wearable robots, are electromechanical devices that have become the focus of academic and industrial research in recent years, and their applications in power augmentation have increased. One of the most important challenges of these applications is controlling the robot and synchronizing it with the user. The close interaction of the robot with the user and the change of movement pattern between different users and different gait cycles show the importance of estimating the user's movement intention, but the need for online method of estimating the movement intention and the complexity of accurate dynamic modeling has caused researchers to use reinforcement learning (RL) in... 

Control of powered lower limb prostheses has a locomotion mode- ependent structure which demands a pattern recognizer that can classify the current locomotion mode and also detect transitions between them in an appropriate time. In the way to achieve this goal, this project presents a locomotion mode recognition system to classify daily locomotion modes consist of level- walking, stair climbing, slope walking, standing and sitting using low-cost mechanical sensors. Since these signals have a quasi-periodic nature, using sequential pattern recognition tools, such as Hidden Markov Model(HMM) improves the recognition performance,because they use sequences of information to make a decision. On... 

Exoskeleton robot is so useful because of the interaction with them and human and are used in rehabilitation and augmentation applications. These robots can be either passively or actively actuated. Human and robot interaction is an important issue involved with these robots. In this thesis, the interaction force reduction is considered leading to the transparency of a lower limb exoskeleton during switch between swing and stance phasees of walking. Achieving this goal, a robust Lyapunov based motion control method has been developed. The desired reference signals for motion control are generated using a direct force control approach. Robot accelerations are estimated by an observer to be... 

The goal of this project is to propose an algorithm to detect human motion intent during level walking. The primary aim of this algorithm should be to reduce human-robot interaction forces by combining EMG and force signals. Human gait is composed of 6 different stages. During each stage, each muscle is activated differently so it is possible to detect human intent by a pattern recognition technique. However, due to the fact that EMG signals are unrepeatable and noisy, we propose that combining EMG, motion and interaction force signals may lead to more concise and repeatable estimates of human motion intent. As a result, this control approach is expected to reduce human robot interaction... 

Todays, the exoskeleton is known as a practical device for use in robotic rehabilitation and elderly assistance and has attracted the attention of many researchers. Impedance control is the most widely recognized control strategy in research on exoskeletons. Impedance control can properly handle soft interaction of robots with the environment. Optimal target impedance selection can increase the performance of the overall system and guarantee the stability. The main objective of this research was to introduce a variable impedance control system and verifying the presented control system on an exoskeleton. In this research, an exoskeleton with 4 active DoF and 8 semi-passive DoF is designed... 

The main goal of this thesis is to develop and implement a variable Impedance control method with the ability to refine the desired gait in an online manner. For this purpose, a dataset consisting of 89 healthy gaits was utilized. Then, “Basic shapes” were driven using principal component analysis and their meaningfulness was investigated. Regarding the meaningfulness of coefficients of basic shapes, a normality metric was defined to evaluate the human gaits. Furthermore, as a reference gait refinement in Impedance control, an outer loop was added to change the desired gait, according to traversed gait. Kalman filter was used to estimate the coefficients of basic shapes in this loop. In... 

Wearable robots, or exoskeletons, are electromechanical devices that aim to assist user by supplying additional mechanical power as needed. The interaction of these robots with humans and the possibility of robots using their various abilities such as intelligence, control power, sensors, etc., make one of the crucial components of these control algorithms, its interaction and integration with the user. In this regard, functional electrical stimulation is one way to use human abilities to control the robot and achieve broader goals. Adding functional electrical stimulation to a wearable robot creates an emerging group of robots called hybrid exoskeletons. Hybrid exoskeletons provide the... 

Nowadays, the developments in control and robotics provide rehabilitation and power augmentation applications for the exoskeleton robots. In the rehabilitation applications, the goal is to help elderly and persons with paraplegia to do their daily activities and movements. One of this applications is to help these individuals for postural stability and recovering balance after receiving perturbations. In this research, we propose a control strategy for a lower limb exoskeleton to help the wearer to recover balance after a perturbation without using crutches. Here, we concentrate on the stance phase when a push is exerted to the robot and try to make the system quite upright. Therefore, a... 

Hybrid Exoskeletons refer to simultaneous use of wearable robots and functional electrical stimulation technology. Hybrid exoskeletons have many advantages compared to the separate application of each of these technologies, such as reducing the robot’s energy consumption and the need for lighter and cheaper actuators for the robot, using humans muscle power, and reducing muscle fatigue. As a result, these robots have recently attracted a lot of interest in rehabilitation applications for patients suffering from mobility impairment.Control in hybrid exoskeletons is more complicated than control in traditional exoskeletons. Because in addition to robot and functional electrical stimulation... 

Many workers and soldiers suffer from musculoskeletal problems due to carrying heavy loads. Using exoskeleton robots which are designed for power augmentation can be effective in preventing these disorders. Due to the interaction of these robots with human, it is necessary to design an appropriate control system for these robots, therefore, the aim of this research is to design a predictive nonlinear control system for a three degrees of freedom lower-limb Exoskeleton robot, in order to improve the performance of the robot, follow trajectory of human joints and reduce the interaction forces between human and the robot during the squatting activity. Multi-stage model predictive controller...