Impedance control in a wave-based teleoperator for rehabilitation motor therapies assisted by robots

• An improved wave-based bilateral teleoperator for robotic rehabilitation therapies is proposed.
• Master and slave manipulators controlled by impedance provide versatility to telerehabiltation systems.
• A stable human–robot interaction with suitable force and path tracking is achieved.

This paper presents an improved wave-based bilateral teleoperation scheme for rehabilitation therapies assisted by robot manipulators. The main feature of this bilateral teleoperator is that both robot manipulators, master and slave, are controlled by impedance. Thus, a pair of motion-based adaptive impedance controllers are integrated into a wave-based configuration, in order to guarantee a stable human–robot interaction and to compensate the position drift, characteristic of the available schemes of bilateral teleoperation. Moreover, the teleoperator stability, in the presence of time delays in the communication channel, is guaranteed because the wave-variable approach is included to encode the force and velocity signals. It should be noted that the proposed structure enables the implementation of several teleoperator schemes, from passive therapies, without the intervention of a human operator on the master side, to fully active therapies where both manipulators interact with humans in a stable manner. The suitable performance of the proposed teleoperator is verified through some results obtained from the simulation of the passive and active-constrained modes, by considering typical tasks in motor-therapy rehabilitation, where an improved behavior is observed when compared to implementations of the classical wave-based approach.