Design and control of a new tendon-driven exoskeletal lower body power assistive device

초록

Recently the exoskeletal power assistive equipment which is a kind of wearable robot has been widely developed to help the human body motion. For the elderly people and patients, however, some limits exist due to the weight and volume of the equipments. As a feasible solution, a tendon-driven exoskeletal power assistive device for the lower body, and caster walker are proposed in this research. Since the caster walker carries the heavy items, the weight and volume of the wearable exoskeleton are minimized. The fuzzy control is used to generate the joint torque required to assist motions such as sitting, standing and walking. Experiments were performed for several motions and the EMG sensors were used to measure the magnitude of assistance. When the motion of sitting down and standing up was compared with and without wearing the proposed device, the 27% assistance was acquired.