Development of an Exoskeleton System for Elderly and Disabled People

For supporting daily activities of elderly and physically disabled people who have lost their body functioning of motions, we have developed a 7-DOF robotic exoskeleton system. It is intended to assist the motions of shoulder and elbow by mounting this on a wheel chair since human shoulder and elbow motions are involved in a lot of activities of everyday life. The proposed mechanism can maximize workspace while escaping singularity by combining the parallel mechanism at the wrist part. Admittance based velocity control scheme enables a variety of tasks to be implemented and allows us to achieve fast enough motion with acceptable accuracy. Preliminary results for mechanism analysis, trajectory tracking experiment are shown.