In recent years, roboticists have developed a wide range of systems that could eventually be introduced in health care and assisted living facilities. These include both medical robots and robots designed to provide companionship or assistance to human users.
Researchers at Shanghai Jiao Tong University and the University of Shanghai for Science and Technology recently developed a robotic system that could give human users a massage that employs traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) techniques. This new robot, introduced in a paper on the arXiv preprint server, could eventually be deployed in health care, wellness and rehabilitation facilities as additional therapeutic tools for patients who are experiencing different types of pain or discomfort.
“We adopt an adaptive admittance control algorithm to optimize force and position control, ensuring safety and comfort,” wrote Yuan Xu, Kui Huang, Weichao Guo and Leyi Du in their paper. “The paper analyzes key TCM techniques from kinematic and dynamic perspectives and designs robotic systems to reproduce these massage techniques.”
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