An Interactive Hands-Free Controller for a Riding Ballbot to Enable Simple Shared Control Tasks

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Xiao, Chenzhang, Song, Seung Yun, Chen, Yu, Mansouri, Mahshid, Ramos, Joao, Norris, William R., Hsiao-Wecksler, Elizabeth T.
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Xiao, Chenzhang
Song, Seung Yun
Chen, Yu
Mansouri, Mahshid
Ramos, Joao
Norris, William R.
Hsiao-Wecksler, Elizabeth T.
author_facet Xiao, Chenzhang
Song, Seung Yun
Chen, Yu
Mansouri, Mahshid
Ramos, Joao
Norris, William R.
Hsiao-Wecksler, Elizabeth T.
contents Our team developed a riding ballbot (called PURE) that is dynamically stable, omnidirectional, and driven by lean-to-steer control. A hands-free admittance control scheme (HACS) was previously integrated to allow riders with different torso functions to control the robot's movements via torso leaning and twisting. Such an interface requires motor coordination skills and could result in collisions with obstacles due to low proficiency. Hence, a shared controller (SC) that limits the speed of PURE could be helpful to ensure the safety of riders. However, the self-balancing dynamics of PURE could result in a weak control authority of its motion, in which the torso motion of the rider could easily result in poor tracking of the command speed dictated by the shared controller. Thus, we proposed an interactive hands-free admittance control scheme (iHACS), which added two modules to HACS to improve the speed-tracking performance of PURE: control gain personalization module and interaction compensation module. Human riding tests of simple tasks, idle-keeping and speed-limiting, were conducted to compare the performance of HACS and iHACS. Two manual wheelchair users and two able-bodied individuals participated in this study. They were instructed to use "adversarial" torso motions that would tax the SC's ability to keep the ballbot idling or below a set speed. In the idle-keeping tasks, iHACS demonstrated minimal translational motion and low command speed tracking RMSE, even with significant torso lean angles. During the speed-limiting task with command speed saturated at 0.5 m/s, the system achieved an average maximum speed of 1.1 m/s with iHACS, compared with that of over 1.9 m/s with HACS. These results suggest that iHACS can enhance PURE's control authority over the rider, which enables PURE to provide physical interactions back to the rider and results in a collaborative rider-robot synergy.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2409_19170
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle An Interactive Hands-Free Controller for a Riding Ballbot to Enable Simple Shared Control Tasks
Xiao, Chenzhang
Song, Seung Yun
Chen, Yu
Mansouri, Mahshid
Ramos, Joao
Norris, William R.
Hsiao-Wecksler, Elizabeth T.
Robotics
Our team developed a riding ballbot (called PURE) that is dynamically stable, omnidirectional, and driven by lean-to-steer control. A hands-free admittance control scheme (HACS) was previously integrated to allow riders with different torso functions to control the robot's movements via torso leaning and twisting. Such an interface requires motor coordination skills and could result in collisions with obstacles due to low proficiency. Hence, a shared controller (SC) that limits the speed of PURE could be helpful to ensure the safety of riders. However, the self-balancing dynamics of PURE could result in a weak control authority of its motion, in which the torso motion of the rider could easily result in poor tracking of the command speed dictated by the shared controller. Thus, we proposed an interactive hands-free admittance control scheme (iHACS), which added two modules to HACS to improve the speed-tracking performance of PURE: control gain personalization module and interaction compensation module. Human riding tests of simple tasks, idle-keeping and speed-limiting, were conducted to compare the performance of HACS and iHACS. Two manual wheelchair users and two able-bodied individuals participated in this study. They were instructed to use "adversarial" torso motions that would tax the SC's ability to keep the ballbot idling or below a set speed. In the idle-keeping tasks, iHACS demonstrated minimal translational motion and low command speed tracking RMSE, even with significant torso lean angles. During the speed-limiting task with command speed saturated at 0.5 m/s, the system achieved an average maximum speed of 1.1 m/s with iHACS, compared with that of over 1.9 m/s with HACS. These results suggest that iHACS can enhance PURE's control authority over the rider, which enables PURE to provide physical interactions back to the rider and results in a collaborative rider-robot synergy.
title An Interactive Hands-Free Controller for a Riding Ballbot to Enable Simple Shared Control Tasks
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.19170