Design and Control of a Wearable Robot

Wearable Robot Arm의 제작 및 제어

As human-friendly robot techniques improve, the concept of the wearability of robotic arms becomes important. A master arm that detects human arm motion and provides virtual forces to the operator is an embodied concept of a wearable robotic arm. In this study, we design a 7 DOF wearable robotic arm with high joint torques. An operator wearing this robotic arm can move around freely because this robotic arm was designed to have its fixed point at the shoulder part of the operator. The proposed robotic arm uses parallel mechanisms at the shoulder part and the wrist part on the model of the human muscular structure of an upper limb. To reduce the computational load in solving the forward kinematics and to prevent singularity motions of the parallel mechanism, yawing motion of the parallel mechanisms was separated using a slip ling mechanism. The total weight of the proposed robotic arm is about 4 kg. An experimental result of force tracking test for the pneumatic control system and an application example for VR robot are described to show the validity of the robot.