Science of Soft Robots – Interdisciplinary integration of mechatronics, material science, and bio-computing

B02-02 : Measurements of the limitations in designing and controlling a wearable power-assist soft robot while keeping the user’s natural body sensations, and their implications in neuroscience

Summary

Leader Takako Yoshida (Tokyo Institute of Technology)

We will develop an exoskeleton power-support robot suit with soft actuators to establish a method to psychologically measure and visualize the sensations of healthy and handicapped users. In particular, our goal is to measure and visualize two sensations?sensation that the robot is part of the user’s own body (in other words, that the user has ownership) and the sensation that the human user, not the robot, is the subject controlling their body (in other words, that the user has a sense of agency). The major goal of this research is to measure these sensations and better understand how the human brain controls the body when wearing a power-support robot suit.
In contrast to other actuators, a soft actuator does not affect medical body part imaging processes such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and works in high-magnetic fields. By leveraging the unique characteristics of a soft actuator, we develop psychophysics measurement methods and a partial prototype or system module to measure and visualize the brain activity of a human user wearing an exoskeleton power-support robot suit. Simultaneously, we assess the system’s safety for human participants and the MRI facility. We can perform several psychophysics experiments using this system. For example, we can evaluate how a temporal delay in the initiation of robot movement can affect its usability for humans or how wearing a power-support robot suit for a long period of time can change our brain and body. Based on the results of these psychophysical experiments, we can tailor the physical design and control the threshold of the robot to allow human users to keep their natural body sensations while wearing the robot suit. With regard to basic science, one goal of this research is to understand how the human brain and body system collaborate or independently work while keeping the brain’s information processing at a minimum.