
NSF Org: |
IIS Division of Information & Intelligent Systems |
Recipient: |
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Initial Amendment Date: | July 17, 2017 |
Latest Amendment Date: | July 17, 2017 |
Award Number: | 1724464 |
Award Instrument: | Standard Grant |
Program Manager: |
Radhakisan Baheti
IIS Division of Information & Intelligent Systems CSE Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering |
Start Date: | January 1, 2017 |
End Date: | August 31, 2019 (Estimated) |
Total Intended Award Amount: | $539,862.00 |
Total Awarded Amount to Date: | $546,325.00 |
Funds Obligated to Date: |
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History of Investigator: |
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Recipient Sponsored Research Office: |
1200 E CALIFORNIA BLVD PASADENA CA US 91125-0001 (626)395-6219 |
Sponsor Congressional District: |
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Primary Place of Performance: |
PASADENA CA US 91125-0001 |
Primary Place of
Performance Congressional District: |
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Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): |
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Parent UEI: |
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NSF Program(s): | NRI-National Robotics Initiati |
Primary Program Source: |
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Program Reference Code(s): |
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Program Element Code(s): |
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Award Agency Code: | 4900 |
Fund Agency Code: | 4900 |
Assistance Listing Number(s): | 47.070 |
ABSTRACT
There is a pressing need for wearable robots, e.g., prostheses and exoskeletons, which improve the quality of life for individuals with limited mobility - devices that work symbiotically with human users to achieve stable, safe and efficient locomotion. At present, approximately 4.7 million people in the United States would benefit from an active lower-limb exoskeleton due to the effects of stroke, polio, multiple sclerosis, spinal cord injury, and cerebral palsy, and by 2050 an estimated 1.5 million people in the United States will be living with a major lower-limb amputation. Yet current wearable robotic devices do not address this growing population's needs since they are bulky, heavy, noisy, and require large batteries for even short duration use, while implementing predominately hierarchical control algorithms. Impeding innovation in this domain is the expensive and slow traditional design-build-test approach that ignores the tight coupling between hardware specifications and control algorithm performance. The vision of this work is to provide a methodology---inspired by advancements in robotic locomotion---that allows lower-limb prostheses and exoskeletons to meet real-world requirements through the co-design of the electromechanical and feedback systems. The transformative nature of this work, therefore, stems from its ability to realize wearable robots that synergize with humans to achieve increased mobility, providing a template for the growing robotic assistive device industry and potentially improving the quality of life of millions.
To realize the vision of this work, the overarching research goal is to create a new unified control and design framework that will allow for the efficient and stable locomotion of robots, prostheses, and exoskeletons. A key aspect of this control methodology is the ability to continuously mediate between different objectives enforcing stability and safety in an efficient manner through force-based interactions among (wearable) robotic devices, their environment and the user. The resulting framework will be utilized via control-in-the-loop mechanical design of prostheses and exoskeletons with stringent design requirements, tested experimentally on a novel humanoid robot, and clinically evaluated through human subject trials. This work is, therefore, guided by the following specific goals: (1) develop a unified online optimization-based control framework for (wearable) robotic locomotion that efficiently mediates stability, safety and force constraints, (2) create a feedback loop between formal control synthesis and the mechanical design of wearable robots that satisfy stringent performance requirements, (3) accelerate clinical testing by translating controllers formally and experimentally from bipedal humanoid robots to prostheses and exoskeletons. As a result of these research goals, this work has the potential to create the next generation of robotic systems that enable stable, safe and efficient human mobility.
PUBLICATIONS PRODUCED AS A RESULT OF THIS RESEARCH
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PROJECT OUTCOMES REPORT
Disclaimer
This Project Outcomes Report for the General Public is displayed verbatim as submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI) for this award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Report are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation; NSF has not approved or endorsed its content.
In terms of Intellectual Merit, the major finding of the project was a unified approach to robotic systems and robotic assistive (wearable) devices. In particular, we enhanced the control system designs for humanoid robots (even under safety-critical constraints), and translated the resulting gait generation technology and control infrastructure to prostheses and exoskeletons. These results were at the theoretic front as reported in numerous publications, and at the experimental level in which the concepts were implemented on multiple bipedal robots, a custom-built lower-limb prosthesis, and a full-body exoskeleton that allows a paraplegic person to walk without the use of crutches or any external device. That is, the mathematical methods and their algorithmic instantiation resulted in the first exoskeleton walking for paraplegics. This combination of theoretical and experimental results on platforms raging from walking robots, to prosthetic devices, to exoskeletons is unprecedented and highlights the benefits of NSF funding projects that encourage the collaboration of PIs in multiple universities (in this case, Caltech, Michigan, and Berkeley) and with industry (in this case, the startup company Wandercraft). There were many cross-university engagements for the graduate students and there were internship positions with the company involved.
Publications from the project have been made open source via the PIs personal websites and through placing papers on the arXiv. In addition, an important outcome of this project related to dissemination was a software package, FROST, that yields dynamic walking gaits on bipedal robots; this has been released as open-source software on GitHub. The videos reporting the results of this project have been placed on the public domain via YouTube. Finally, the results from this project have been covered extensively by the media, including: IEEE Spectrum, Washington Post, Wired, LA Times, and televised nationally on CBS, just to name a few.
The broader impacts of this project have included education, collaboration with industry, and the first steps toward restoring locomotion for the mobility impaired. By collaborating with a startup (with which the PIs have no financial interest), the PIs graduate students had access to world-leading hardware for their dissertation work. This led to publications with the company that highlighted the value of fundamental research to products that help society. Indeed, by collaborating with the company, the NSF researchers sped up the transfer of fundamental work to society. Indeed, exoskeletons with control laws (in part) based on the work have already been placed in rehabilitation centers. Importantly, the results of this collaboration have been published in the public domain and made available on open-source platforms. The company was not given any privileged information. In fact, the company shared vital information with the NSF researchers that allowed them to better target their research questions. The result was the first clinical demonstration of dynamic walking for paraplegics aided by the underlying science developed in this project.
Last Modified: 02/17/2020
Modified by: Aaron D Ames
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