Industrial 8-DOF upper extremity exoskeleton: A dynamic analysis

Exoskeletons are wearable robots attached to the body, and they help improve the physical ability of their users. They have been wildly exploited for military and rehabilitation applications, but they were less used in industry.The 8-DOF anthropometric upper extremity exoskeleton with patent No.85962 was designed to assist the users in lifting loads up to 30 kg in industrial fields. The purpose of this paper was to conduct a kinematic and dynamic analysis of this exoskeleton in order to control joint actuators in future works. In the present paper the joint link parameters of the exoskeleton were attained according to Denavit-Hartenberg convention. The position of the end effector of the arm was computed using forward kinematics. The state equations and required torques of the system were derived using the Lagrangian formulation technique. A movement associated with lifting a specific load was created and relative joint paths were fed to the inverse dynamics model. The required torques for this movement were calculated and presented in the result section

Keywords:

Upper extremity exoskeleton , assistive robotics , forward kinematics , inverse dynamics , equations of motion