Employing WholeBody Control in Assistive Robotics Lightweight robotic manipulators in combination with power wheelchairs can help to restore the mobility of people with disabilities. While such systems are available on the market, they typically are limited to fully manual control modes. In research, shared control methods are employed, to increase the usability of these systems. Here, we present an additional extension, by introducing a wholebody control concept to the assistive robotic system EDAN. Combined with shared control, the wholebody controller allows the realization of complex tasks which necessitate the coordination of arm and platform, while ensuring compliant behavior resulting from the impedance control law. The implemented approach is analyzed and validated in an exemplary task of opening a door, passing through it and closing it afterwards. While this task would exceed the reachability of the arm in a classical approach, the combination of wholebody control with a shared control scheme allows for quick and efficient execution.

Unified HumanRobot Shared Control with Application to Haptic Telemanipulation Humanrobot shared control (SC) has largely been studied in two complementary forms, namely divisible shared control (DSC) and interactive shared control (ISC). DSC enables clean division of the human and the robot subtasks, thus enabling them to work independently, while ISC allows for flexible intervention to improve the collaborative performance or experience. This paper presents a unified scheme that combines both forms of SCs to attain the benefits of flexibility as well as ease of use when human and robot jointly work on a task together. Based on the idea that flexibility should be embedded in every task constraint that the robot is controlling, we connect ISC into the robot subtask providing a soft boundary between the divided orthogonal subspaces allowing human to access the robot subtask and intervene whenever necessary. We also propose a new simple yet effective Cartesian stiffness adaptation law that enables the robot to modify its endpoint stiffness in the robotxe2x80x99s control subspace in the presence of disagreement from the human. Simulations and real robot studies for a teleoperated pathfollowing scenario were performed to demonstrate the flexibility of the unified shared control (USC), which allows the robot to dynamically adapt its task based on the operatorxe2x80x99s intentions.