Physical Human Robot Interaction

Since the fall semester 2011, the Rehabilitation Engineering Lab is offering a course on Physical Human-Robot Interaction. The weekly 2h lecture, covering topics such as human factors, sensing, data acquisition, actuation, modeling control and safety/performance analysis, is complemented by weekly 2h laboratory sessions and a specialization project.

The concept of this course is described in detail in Download Gassert et al., IEEE Trans Educ 56(1), 2013 (PDF, 1.5 MB).

Course Goal

The goal of this course is for students to understand the critical elements in human-robot interactions – both in terms of engineering and human factors – and use these to evaluate and design safe and efficient assistive and rehabilitative robotic systems.

Course Application

To apply for the course, please prepare a letter of motivation (max. one A4 page). Please include in the letter which study program and semester you are in. Please describe why you would like to attend the course and what you expect to learn during the course. The letter should be sent to by September 1st of the current year.

Laboratory Sessions

Laboratory sessions are carried out on the ETHZ Haptic Paddle, a low-cost force-feedback device based on the open hardware haptic paddle successfully used at universities throughout the US.

You can obtain a copy of the ETHZ Haptic Paddle hardware documentation by completing the linked request form.

Course Description

This link will take you to the page of the Physical Human-Robot Interaction course in the ETHZ course catalogue.