In this section
Soft and flexible robotic systems for affordable healthcare.
Our research investigates fundamental aspects of control of soft and flexible robots for surgery. These include harnessing the intrinsic compliance of soft robots, rejecting disturbances that characterise the surgical environment, and complying with stringent safety requirements. Our ambition is to provide affordable robotic solutions for a range of surgical applications, including endoscopy, percutaneous intervention, and multi-handed surgery.
Robotics for healthcare is one of the fastest growing segments in the global robotics market. However, conventional surgical robots are unaffordable in low-resource settings. Harnessing the potential of soft and flexible robots can contribute to making surgery safter, more accurate, and more accessible in low-middle income countries. These are pressing needs due to the aging population, and to the growing workforce crisis in the healthcare market.
Our work aims to improve accuracy, reduce the risk of injury, and reduce discomfort in percutaneous interventions such as biopsy, in diagnostic and interventional endoscopy, and in multi-handed surgery.
Dr Enrico Franco
Lecturer
@article{Franco:2019:10.1080/00207179.2019.1622039,
author = {Franco, E},
doi = {10.1080/00207179.2019.1622039},
journal = {International Journal of Control},
pages = {860--870},
title = {IDA-PBC with adaptive friction compensation for underactuated mechanical systems},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00207179.2019.1622039},
volume = {94},
year = {2019}
}
TY - JOUR
AB - In this work the control of underactuated mechanical systems with dry friction on actuated and unactuated joints is investigated. A new interconnection-and-damping-assignment passivity-based-control (IDA-PBC) design is presented, which includes the adaptive estimation of the friction forces and the introduction of a nonlinear dissipative term in the closed-loop system dynamics. As a result, the traditional IDA-PBC is complemented with an additional matching condition and the control law is augmented with a new term that accounts for the Coulomb friction forces on all joints. Two adaptive control paradigms are considered for comparison purposes and stability conditions are discussed. The control design is detailed for two demonstrative examples: the disk-on-disk system; the Acrobot system. The effectiveness of the proposed design is demonstrated with numerical simulations.
AU - Franco,E
DO - 10.1080/00207179.2019.1622039
EP - 870
PY - 2019///
SN - 0020-7179
SP - 860
TI - IDA-PBC with adaptive friction compensation for underactuated mechanical systems
T2 - International Journal of Control
UR - http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00207179.2019.1622039
UR - https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00207179.2019.1622039
UR - http://hdl.handle.net/10044/1/70629
VL - 94
ER -
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