Development of wire-type motion support system controlled by servo brakes

In this paper, we develop a passive wire-type motion support system controlled by servo brakes to assist human motion in the fields of rehabilitation and sports training. We also propose a control method to guide the human hand by using the servo brakes which cannot generate a driving force. This passive system is intrinsically safe and wire-type motion support system has a wide operating range. But, passive systems using servo brakes sometimes cannot generate enough force to guide the human hand along the desired path because the system does not have enough brake units to generate the desired force. In this paper, we consider the feasible braking force region of a passive system with multiple brake units and discuss the method to generate the desired force appropriately. We conduct a path-following experiment and the experimental results illustrate the validity of the wire-type passive motion support system controlled by servo brakes.