Wearable agrirobot

We have developed an exoskeleton robot for agriculture. It assists farmers in harvesting vegetables and fruits, and carrying the heavy load such as potato bags and cabbage boxes. We have made the robots for some types of farming and discussed the sensors and control of it. We have also performed experiments in order to demonstrate how the robot operates for agricultural purposes thereby showing the potential of the robo

Exoskeletons to enhance human capabilities and support rehabilitation: a state of the art

El presente artículo presenta una revisión bibliográfica sobre el diseño de exoesqueletos y las diferentes aplicaciones que estos pueden tener en la vida humana. Se exponen diferentes desarrollos, resaltando las partes más importantes de cada uno y prestando especial atención al área de la ingeniería electrónica presente en estas estructuras. Además, se realiza un agrupamiento de los diseños, dependiendo de la zona corporal para la cual se ha construido el exoesqueleto o de la finalidad del estudio realizado. Finalmente, se presentan desarrollos y estudios que buscan utilizar las señales mioeléctricas como parte fundamental del sistema exoesquelético.This paper presents a literature review about exoskeletons and their applications in human life. Different developments highlighting the most important parts of each of them, and paying particular attention to the area of electronic engineering related to these structures, are shown. Also, a grouping of the different kinds of structures is made depending on the area of the human body to which the exoskeleton was intended to or depending on the purpose of the research. Finally, various studies and developments which use mioelectric signals as a fundamental part of the system are presented

Evaluation Of Impedance Control On A Powered Hip Exoskeleton

This thesis presents an impedance control strategy for a novel powered hip exoskeleton designed to provide partial assistance and leverage the dynamics of human gait. The control strategy is based on impedance control and provides the user assistance as needed which is determined by the user’s interaction with the exoskeleton. A series elastic element is used to drive the exoskeleton and measures the interaction torque between the user and the device. The device operates in two modes. Free mode is a low impedance state that attempts to provide no assistance. Assist mode increases the gains of the controller to provide assistance as needed. The device was tested on five healthy subjects, and the resulting assistive hip torque was evaluated to determine the ability of the controller to provide gait assistance. The device was evaluated at different speeds to assess the gait speed adaptation performance of the controller. Results show that hip torque assistance range was between 0.3 to 0.5 Nm/kg across the subjects, corresponding to 24% to 40% of the maximum hip torque requirements of healthy adults during walking. The peak power provided by the system is 35 W on average and a peak power of up to 45 W

Design and modeling of an upper extremity exoskeleton

Abstract-This paper presents the design and modeling results of an upper extremity exoskeleton mounted on a wheel chair. This new device is dedicated to regular and efficient rehabilitation training for weak and injured people without the continuous presence of a therapist. The exoskeleton being a wearable robotic device attached to the human arm, the user provides information signals to the controller in order to generate the appropriate control signals for different training strategies and paradigms. This upper extremity exoskeleton covers four basic degrees of freedom of the shoulder and the elbow joints with three additional adaptability degrees of freedom in order to match the arm anatomy of different users

Design and Implementation of NTU Wearable Exoskeleton as an Enhancement and Assistive Device

This article presents a wearable lower extremity exoskeleton (LEE) developed to enhance the ability of a human’s walking while carrying heavy loads. The ultimate goal of the current research work is to design and control a power assist system that integrates a human’s intellect for feedback and sensory purposes. The exoskeleton system in this work consists of an inner exoskeleton and an outer exoskeleton. The inner exoskeleton measures the movements of the wearer and provides these measurements to the outer exoskeleton, which supports the whole exoskeleton system to walk following the wearer. A special footpad, which is designed and attached to the outer exoskeleton, can measure the zero moment point (ZMP) of the human as well as that of the exoskeleton in time. Using the measured human ZMP as the reference, the exoskeleton’s ZMP is controlled by trunk compensation so that the exoskeleton can walk stably. A simulation platform has first been developed to examine the gait coordination through inner and outer exoskeletons. A commercially available software, xPC Target, together with other toolboxes from MATLAB, has then been used to provide a real-time operating system for controlling the exoskeleton. Real-time locomotion control of the exoskeleton is implemented in the developed environment. Finally, some experiments on different objects showed that the stable walking can be achieved in the real environment

Command Filter Backstepping Sliding Model Control for Lower-Limb Exoskeleton

A command filter adaptive fuzzy backstepping control strategy is proposed for lower-limb assisting exoskeleton. Firstly, the human-robot model is established by taking the human body as a passive part, and a coupling torque is introduced to describe the interaction between the exoskeleton and human leg. Then, Vicon motion capture system is employed to obtain the reference trajectory. For the purpose of obviating the “explosion of complexity” in conventional backstepping, a second-order command filter is introduced into the sliding mode control strategy. The fuzzy logic systems (FLSs) are also applied to handle with the chattering problem by estimating the uncertainties and disturbances. Furthermore, the stability of the closed-loop system is proved based on the Lyapunov theory. Finally, simulation results are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the control strategy