Bilateral Control of Elbow and Shoulder Joints Using Functional Electrical Stimulation Between Humans and Robots

Robotic remote-control technologies have a wide field of applications. Bilateral control is a type of remote-control technique. Most of the existing bilateral control techniques require complicated force transmission mechanisms in the master systems. Therefore, operators feel discomfort due to a sense of restraint by the exoskeleton-type robot arms. We attempted to solve this problem by incorporating functional electrical stimulation into the master system. In this study, bilateral control was proposed between a human and a three-joint robot with three degrees of freedom using functional electrical stimulation for shoulder and elbow joints. The experiment consisted of extracting a block of Jenga using the slave robot. The proposed method was compared to unilateral control in which the master moves freely without feedback to the master.