Continuum manipulators can conform to curvilinear paths and manipulate objects in complex environments, which makes it emerging to be applied in minimally invasive surgery (MIS). However, different and controllable operating stiffness of the continuum manipulator is required during different stages of surgery to achieve safe access or stable and precise operation. This work proposes an operating stiffness controller (OSC) for the typical tendon-driven continuum manipulator based on the variable impedance control method with Lagrangian dynamic modeling. This controller can adjust the operating stiffness by modifying the driving forces along the driving tendons of the continuum manipulator without changing its material or structure. The proposed OSC converts the damping and stiffness matrices of the impedance control into variable parameters. This merit allows it to dynamically adjust the operating stiffness of the continuum manipulator according to the desired constant or time-varying stiffness. Furthermore, the OSC stability can be proven based on a Lyapunov function, and its stiffness control performances have been analyzed and evaluated in both simulations and experiments. The OSC controller generated average relevant error values of 7.82% and 3.09% for the operating stiffness control experiments with constant and time-varying desired stiffness, respectively. These experimental results indicate that the OSC has high accuracy, stability, and strong robustness in the operating stiffness control tasks.

Wrist rehabilitation exoskeletons have gained much attention over the last decades, striving to restore motor functions for patients with neuromuscular disorders. Electromyography signal has been employed to estimate the motion intention to achieve interactive training schemes. However, it is a challenging task to estimate the joint impedance in real time, as it is a crucial parameter for control of exoskeletons. This article proposes an adaptive cooperative control strategy for a wrist exoskeleton based on a real-time joint impedance estimation approach. By explicitly interpreting the underlying transformation in the muscular and skeletal systems, the proposed approach estimates the motion intention and the joint impedance of a human subject simultaneously without additional calibration procedures and regulates the training trajectories and assistance accordingly. Results indicate the proposed method outperforms other training protocols, including the trajectory tracking control and the fixed cooperative control. The proposed control strategy provides an additional 66.25% motion deviation when estimated joint torque increases 12.36%, which enhances the training effectiveness and the interaction safety and promotes subjects' active engagement.

Data-driven methods have become increasingly more prominent for musculoskeletal modelling due to their conceptually intuitive simple and fast implementation. However, the performance of a pre-trained data-driven model using the data from specific subject(s) may be seriously degraded when validated using the data from a new subject, hindering the utility of the personalised musculoskeletal model in clinical applications. This paper develops an active physics-informed deep transfer learning framework to enhance the dynamic tracking capability of the musculoskeletal model on the unseen data. The salient advantages of the proposed framework are twofold: 1) For the generic model, physics-based domain knowledge is embedded into the loss function of the data-driven model as soft constraints to penalise/regularise the data-driven model. 2) For the personalised model, the parameters relating to the feature extraction will be directly inherited from the generic model, and only the parameters relating to the subject-specific inference will be fine-tuned by jointly minimising the conventional data prediction loss and the modified physics-based loss. In this paper, we use the synchronous muscle forces and joint kinematics prediction from surface electromyogram (sEMG) as the exemplar to illustrate the proposed framework. Moreover, convolutional neural network (CNN) is employed as the deep neural network to implement the proposed framework, and the physics law between muscle forces and joint kinematics is utilised as the soft constraints. Results of comprehensive experiments on a self-collected dataset from eight healthy subjects indicate the effectiveness and great generalization of the proposed framework.

In this article, we propose a new iterative learning control (ILC) scheme for trajectory tracking of pneumatic muscle (PM) actuators with state constraints. A PM model is constructed in three-element form with both parametric and nonparametric uncertainties, while full state constraints are considered for enhancing operational safety. To ensure that system states are within the predefined bounds, the barrier Lyapunov function (BLF) is used in the analysis, which reaches infinity when some of its arguments approach limits. The proposed ILC incorporates the BLF with the composite energy function (CEF) approach and ensures the boundedness of CEF in the closed-loop, thus, assuring that those limits are not transgressed. Through rigorous analysis, we show that under the proposed ILC scheme, uniform convergences of PM state tracking errors are guaranteed. Simulation studies and experimental validations are conducted to illustrate the efficacy of the proposed scheme. Experimental results show that the proposed ILC satisfies the state constraint requirements and the tracking error is less than 2.5% of the desired trajectory.

This letter investigates the repetitive range of motion (ROM) training control for a compliant ankle rehabilitation robot (CARR). The CARR utilizes four pneumatic muscle (PM) actuators to manipulate the ankle with three rational degree-of-freedoms (DoFs) and soft human-robot interaction, but the strong-nonlinearity of the PM actuator makes precise tracking difficult. To improve the training effectiveness, a data-driven adaptive iterative learning controller (DDAILC) is proposed based on compact form dynamic linearization (CFDL) with estimated pseudo-partial derivative (PPD). Instead of using a PM dynamic model, the estimated PPD is updated merely by online input-output (I/O) measures. Sufficient conditions are established to guarantee the convergence of tracking errors and the boundedness of control input. Experimental studies are conducted on ten human participants with two therapist-resembled trajectories. Compared with other data-driven methods, the proposed DDAILC demonstrates significant improvement on tracking performance.