Hybrid Force Tracking Impedance Control-Based Autonomous Robotic System for Tooth Brushing Assistance of Disabled People

Due to the increase of the world ageing population and several forms of disabilities, assistive robots have received a lot of attention lately. Although, different assistive robotic systems have been developed to perform essential tasks around the head, these existing robotic systems are either manually controlled, shared controlled or interactive ones. Although, fully autonomous robotic systems can have the potential of eliminating several limitations of the existing systems, such systems are limited in design due to critical issues of increased complexities and the associated risks. In this article, a hybrid impedance controller-based autonomous assistive robotic system for tooth brushing assistance is developed. A fixed base manipulator with an attached automatic tooth brush and Kinect RGB-D sensor are proposed as a platform to achieve the brushing task. An online face detection, mouth detection, head pose estimation and trajectory planning for the brushing task are achieved. Additionally, online re-planning the trajectories in case of patients' head pose changes is taken into account. The controller performance is evaluated regarding tracking the generated brushing trajectories and the desired force trajectory by co-simulating the manipulator's dynamics in ADAMS and SIMULINK. The results demonstrate the capability of the proposed robotic system to achieve tooth brushing autonomously.