Using Humanoid Technologies to Assist Humans
Jun Morimoto, Member, IEEE

Abstract— Many countries are now facing problems associate
to an aging population. Therefore, using robotics technologies tosupport daily life of elderly people and patients is becoming animportant research topic. In my talk, I will introduce our newly
developed exoskeleton robot, and show that humanoid control
methods can be used to control the exoskeleton robot forassisting human movements.

I. INTRODUCTION
Since many countries are facing the problems associated withan aging population, the development of an exoskeleton robot
to assist user movements is becoming important research topic.
In particular, exoskeleton robots can be used as prosthetic
devices for patients such as stroke patients and spinal cord
injury patients in rehabilitation programs. In recent years, it
has been found that using brain activity to control a robotic
assistive system can promote recovery of the arm and handfunctions. Therefore, it may be possible to enhance recovery
of lower limb motor functions by controlling an exoskeleton
robot for assisting the lower limbs through brain activity. We
develop an EEG-Exoskeleton robot system, where theexoskeleton robot is connected to the EEG measurement
system so that the users can control the exoskeleton robot byusing their brain activity (See Fig. 1) [1][2].

Figure 2. Humaniod robot CB-i.

II. EEG-BASED EXOSKELETON ROBOT CONTROL
We use a classification method which considers covariancematrices of measured EEG signals as inputs to decode brain
activities. The decoded brain activity is used to control
exoskeleton movements. In particular, we consider the task ofassisting the stand-up movement, i.e. one of the mostfrequently used movements and a standard rehabilitation task.
To assist the stand-up movement, we develop a force control
model which takes dynamics of tendon string into account forthe pneumatic-electric hybrid actuation (PEHA) system usedin our exoskeleton robot (See Fig. 3) [1]. We show that theexoskeleton robot successfully assisted the stand-up
movements, where the assist system was controlled by thedecoded brain activities.

Figure 1. EEG-exoskeleton system

In order to maintain balance of the exoskeleton robot andto generate compliant movement, we use a control method
originally developed for our whole-body humanoid CBi(http://www.cns.atr.jp/icorp/index.html, Fig. 2) [3] based on
the force/torque control method [4].

Figure 3. Exoskeletal robot XoR

REFERENCES[1]*Research supported by Strategic Research Program for Brain Science"Brain Machine Interface Development" by the Ministry of Education,Culture, Sports, Science and Technology of Japan; by Global COE Program"Center of Human-Frendly Robotics Based on Cognitive neuroscience" ofthe Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology ofJapan; by Strategic International Research Cooperative Program, JST.
Jun Morimoto is with the Department of Brain Robot Interface, ATR
Computational Neuroscience Labs. 2-2-2 Hikaridai Seikacho Sorakugun,
Kyoto, JAPAN; xmorimo@ atr.jp.

[2]

[3]
[4]

T.Noda et al.,"Brain-Controlled Exoskeleton Robot for BMI
Rehabilitation", IEEE Humaniods 2012, pp.21-27.
J. Morimoto et al, “Extraction of Latent Kinematic Relationships
Between Human Users and Assistive Robots”, IEEE ICRA 2012, pp.
3909-3915.
G. Cheng et al., “CB: A Huamnoid Reserch Platform for exploring
Neuroscience”, Advanced Robotics, vol. 21, pp. 1097-1114.
S. Hyon et al., “XoR: Hybrid drive exoskeleton robot that can balance”,
IEEE IROS 2011, pp.2715–2722.