Humans have a great capacity to perform complex manipulations. However, there are many tasks for which two hands are not enough, such as in surgery. For such tasks, a dyad of people is required. However, when not used to work together, a dyad collaboration can be intermittent, slow and prone to misunderstandings if relied solely on verbal cues.
The current PhD thesis report concerns the design and control of foot interfaces to enable solo four-handed manipulations.
In the first part, we present the platform design in five DoF, with position mapping and haptic force feedback. We tackle the known issue of fatigue when using position mapping, by partially compensating for the dynamics of the leg. Finally, we perform a series of feasibility validations on bipedal teleoperation in 3 and 4 and 5 DoF.
In the second part, a behavioural study investigates a symmetric bipedal holding and transport of an object while working on it with the hands. This study sheds light to the human capacity to use the redundancy given by augmentation with the feet, to assist the task of the hands. We investigate the effect of shared-control for lower limb teleoperation. Two modalities are used: 1. synergistic control of two robotic arms with one foot, 2. force assistance. We evaluate these strategies in terms of objective and subjective metrics, such as physical and cognitive workload and fluency.
Aiming at enabling individualized foot dexterous control, in the third part of the thesis, we addressed the problem of bio-mechanical coupling of foot rotations. This is done by detecting intention to grasp, and selectively easing this action while haptically constraining the foot gestures for tool alignment. A user study was conducted to evaluate our proposed approach in a surgical laparoscopic gripper.
In the fourth and final part, we focus on investigating more demanding tasks for the feet, as well as the coordinated control of four hands, during hybrid-robotic laparoscopic surgery. One foot controls a camera, while the other one performs a grasping task. Noteworthy is that all four-arms can be controlled simultaneously.
For easing the solo surgical task, we design haptic assistance, for autonomous grasping operated by the foot. Finally, we perform a systematic behavioural study to understand the effect of our haptic-shared-control, along with an assistance modality for camera tool-tracking. We cover uni-pedal, bipedal and four-handed task scenarios.
Our main conclusion is that foot gestures can be conditioned with haptic feedback, to effectively control multiple degrees of freedom of a supernumerary robotic arm. Thereby enabling four-arm simultaneous manipulations. This is done specifically by leveraging 1. a foot kinesthetic haptic platform that allows for the use of two feet, 2. leg compensation, and virtual assistive impedance, which are useful to increase comfort and alleviate fatigue. 3. Hybridization of control mappings for foot gestures, with limited range of motion and oblique axes of rotation, 4. Haptic shared-control strategies for prehensile force assistance, coordination assistance, and DoF-individuation assistance. We found that robotic assistance is highly appreciated, and has an important role in simplifying four-handed tasks. Indeed, these are instrumental considerations to enable a more fluent, less demanding, and more performant interaction, in tasks where the feet are supplementing the task of hands.