Measurement method of interaction force between human and wearable assistive robot based on strain of contact part

In order not only to realize the functions of wearable robots, but also to improve the the design of mechanism and controller, and to establish a safety standard of these types of robots, a method to measure the physical interaction at the contact sites of robot and wearer is required. To evaluate the physical interaction, we propose a measurement method based on strain gauge. A basic experiment was conducted to evaluate the proposed method. The proposed method is also applied to Robot Suit HAL for Well-being to evaluate its interaction with a wearer during several kinds of single joint motion task. Experimental results show the plausibility of this approach for the measurement of the interaction force.