The primary goal of this research effort is to improve the effectiveness of skill transfer, rehabilitation, and collaboration via haptic devices. To do so, we will formulate requirements for shared control between humans and robots in haptic systems designed for training, rehabilitation, and collaboration. Experimental test-beds comprised of one and two commercial haptic devices with force sensing capabilities is employed throughout the project. We plan to study two shared control system architectures for skill transfer. In the first, the human acts as the novice or patient, and the robot serves as the expert. Control schemes for the expert system (the haptic device) will be designed and analyzed theoretically and experimentally. The second phase of the research effort will explore human-robot-human interfaces. Here, we will focus on expert-novice and therapist-patient teams, with a robotic system acting as the mediator between the two.
We hypothesize that mediating robotic interfaces (either serving as the expert or placed between a human expert and the novice) can facilitate and improve the effectiveness of skill transfer and collaboration in expert-novice pairs as well as in therapist-patient rehabilitation interactions. To date, we have utilized a shared control training paradigm where dynamic intervention through an automatic feedback controller, acting upon the virtual system, is employed to modify the system dynamics adaptively during training.