Biomechanical HRI Modeling and Mechatronic Design of Exoskeletons for Assistive Applications

A typical application of lightweight assistive exoskeletons is motion assistance for the elderly or the disabled in their daily lives. For assistive exoskeletons, the physical human-robot interaction (HRI) poses big challenges for robot design. The challenges are seen in several aspects, including how to design robots to comply with human anatomy with enhanced portability and comfort, and how to deliver the power assistance needed for moving collaboratively with human limbs, among others. This chapter introduces an approach to exoskeleton design based on biomechanics and mechanical simulations, which aims to design exoskeleton structures and motion controllers effectively, to implement motion assistance as needed. The chapter covers topics including (1) motivation and design challenges of lightweight exoskeletons, (2) fundamentals of biomechanics modeling of pHRI, (3) development of HRI simulation model, (4) mechatronics design with examples.

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