Human–Robot Attachment System for Exoskeletons: Design and Performance Analysis

Abstract

Exoskeleton robots found application in neurorehabilitation, tele-manipulation, and power augmentation. The human-robot attachment system of an exoskeleton should transmit all interaction forces while keeping the anatomical and robotic joint axes aligned. Existing attachment concepts were bounding the performance of modern exoskeletons due to insufficient stiffness for high-performance force control, timeconsuming adaption processes, and/or bulkiness. Therefore, we developed an augmented attachment system for a recent fully actuated 9-DOF upper limb exoskeleton. The proposed system was compared to a conventional solution in a case study with four participants.The proposed attachment system lowered the relative motion between human and robot under static loads for all defined landmarks by 45 % on average. The occurrence of undesired contacts in the trials was mitigated by 74 %, thus, improving conditions for closed-loop force control. Further, the proposed system adapted better to the user's anatomy facilitating more accurate alignment and less obstruction. On average, selfattachment took 43(8.3) s to don(doff). Thereby, the alignment of anatomic landmarks had typically less than 15 mm offset to a thorough expert alignment, making self-attachment eligible. The augmented attachment system and the insights gained by the case study are expected to enable improvement of the physical human-robot interaction of exoskeletons.