Bilateral Control in the Vertical Direction Using Functional Electrical Stimulation

摘要

In this study, we investigated bilateral control in the vertical direction using functional electrical stimulation (FES). Bilateral control is a remote operation technique that incorporates force feedback. This technology has potential applications in everyday life, including allowing medical doctors to make diagnoses or friends to communicate using tactile sensations when far apart. However, current iterations of this technology require robot arms to be worn. This is undesirable as such arms are heavy, and arms with multi degree-of-freedom are difficult to produce. To address these problems, we investigated bilateral control using FES. However, in previous studies, which applied FES to bilateral control, control in the vertical direction and the effect of reaction forces were not investigated. In this study, we verified that vertical control is achievable. First, the movements of a human operator were shown to follow those of another operator in the vertical direction, demonstrating that vertical bilateral control using FES is effective. We next investigated whether an operator could recognize when the partner was holding a weight. This experiment demonstrated that the operator was able to recognize the presence or absence of the weight in the hand of the partner. However, shaking was observed in the arms of the master and slave. We believe that this problem can be eliminated by estimating the reaction forces of arms.