See, Learn, Assist: Safe and Self-Paced Robotic Rehabilitation via Video-Based Learning from Demonstration

TL;DR

This paper introduces a video-based learning framework for safe, self-paced robotic rehabilitation that encodes demonstrations as adaptable trajectories, ensuring safety and accuracy during remote therapy sessions.

Contribution

It presents a novel hybrid control architecture with real-time safety monitoring using GMR, enabling effective remote robot-assisted rehabilitation across multiple modalities.

Findings

Average trajectory error of 3.7cm

Range of motion error of 5.5 degrees

Successful effort-based progression control

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a novel framework that allows therapists to teach robot-assisted rehabilitation exercises remotely via RGB-D video. Our system encodes demonstrations as 6-DoF body-centric trajectories using Cartesian Dynamic Movement Primitives (DMPs), ensuring accurate posture-independent spatial generalization across diverse patient anatomies. Crucially, we execute these trajectories through a decoupled hybrid control architecture that constructs a spatially compliant virtual tunnel, paired with an effort-based temporal dilation mechanism. This architecture is applied to three distinct rehabilitation modalities: Passive, Active-Assisted, and Active-Resistive, by dynamically linking the exercise's execution phase to the patient's tangential force contribution. To guarantee safety, a Gaussian Mixture Regression (GMR) model is learned on-the-fly from the patient's own limb. This allows the detection of abnormal interaction forces and, if necessary, reverses the trajectory to prevent injury. Experimental validation demonstrates the system's precision, achieving an average trajectory reproduction error of 3.7cm and a range of motion (ROM) error of 5.5 degrees. Furthermore, dynamic interaction trials confirm that the controller successfully enforces effort-based progression while maintaining strict spatial path adherence against human disturbances.