Nonlinear Workspace Mapping For Telerobotic Assistance Of Upper Limb In Patients With Severe Movement Disorders

Telerobotic manipulation allows patients living with upper limb impairments to interact with a variety of environments and accomplish through teleoperation daily activities such as playing, feeding, self-care, and leisure, that would otherwise be difficult to perform. In this paper, we propose a nonlinear mapping between the patient’s range of motion and the workspace of an environment being manipulated. The objective is to identify the patient’s workspace and span it to that of the environment or an object, thus optimizing the scaling factor while soliciting the entire patient’s range of motion. The boundaries of each workspace are obtained from scattered measurements of the master and slave robots end-effector position. The nonlinear mapping is then achieved through thin plate spline interpolation that describes deformation between two surfaces by scattered point-to-point preponderances. Experimental results reported in three different scenarios confirm the suitability of the nonlinear transformation to map diverse workspace volumes.