| Innovative exoskeleton suits are developed to assist human motion. Different from conventional power amplifying devices, the ultimate goal of these exoskeleton suits are to achieve comfortable assistance to needed parts of the body rather than high power amplification. As a result, the exoskeleton suits can be lightweight, compact, user-friendly and easy to wear.; Two types of exoskeleton suits are developed. One is for assisting knee motion, and the other is for assisting finger motion.{09}Both suits are composed of exoskeletons, sensors, actuators and a controller. For the knee motion assistance, four pneumatic artificial muscles are used to actuate the exoskeleton for each leg. For the finger motion assistance, an air cylinder is used as an actuator. The exoskeleton suits are controlled using PD and feed-forward control algorithm respectively based on the muscle activity information obtained from innovative muscle stiffness sensors proposed in this research. As a unique man-machine interface, the muscle stiffness sensors non-invasively detect stiffness of a human muscle. An original signal processing technique is developed and applied to overcome external disturbances and to achieve robust sensing of the muscle activities. The advantages of the proposed sensors include their high robustness against external disturbances and their ability to provide accurate information about human muscle activities for controlling the exoskeleton suit.; The effectiveness of the developed exoskeleton suits for knee motion is evaluated through two types of experiments. One is to evaluate the effectiveness of the exoskeleton suits on enhancing operator's strength, the other is to evaluate the effectiveness on reducing operator's fatigue during repetitive knee joint exercise. It is confirmed that the exoskeleton suits enhance strength and reduces fatigue of the operator. The effectiveness of the exoskeleton suit for the finger motion is also experimentally demonstrated on a disabled to recover his finger grasping function.; The exoskeleton suits developed in this research can be conveniently used to assist workers engaged in heavy physical work and to improve quality of life of disabled or senior people. |
