Human-Robot Collaborative System Design and Control Based on Human Dynamics Analysis for Rehabilitation/Human Augmentation

The functional electrical stimulation (FES) bike race at Cybathlon is a competition in which a pilot with a spinal cord injury (SCI) drives a robotic bike using his/her paralyzed muscles. The intelligent technologies embedded in the robotic bike stimulate the paralyzed leg muscles and enable these muscles to actuate through electrical stimulation. This is one of many reasons why we named our team ‘BeAGain’, to allow the user to be him or herself again. The proposed novel methods in this work aim to enrich people’s lives by expanding their mobility for rehabilitation and leisure. Especially, due to the energy consumption of human muscles, muscle fatigue should be properly managed to maintain high speeds for a long duration. To address these problems, we have established a force/motion relationship model for time-variant human muscle actuation by using the data acquired via biomechanical simulation. We are currently developing a human-in-the-loop system dynamic control framework based on biomechanical analysis to enhance the performance of the BeAGain project for further application to various bicycles that uses human muscles during pedaling motion.