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Auxilio: A portable cable-driven exosuit for upper extremity assistance

  • Special Issue: Soft Robotics
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Abstract

This paper introduces a fully portable, lightweight exosuit-type device for shoulder and elbow assistance. The main motivation of this research was to design a portable upper limb exosuit capable to assist dynamic rehabilitation tasks where patient can involve trunk motions and overground movements (e.g., during pick-and-place tasks). The proposed system provides assistance for shoulder flexion and abduction, as well as for elbow flexion. The mechanism is driven by DC motors which are worn on the wearer’s back, and the power is transferred from the actuators to the arm by means of cable-driven transmission. The unique features of the proposed exosuit are the absence of rigid links or joints around the arm, high compliance and portability. This paper describes operating principle and kinematic model of the proposed exosuit and provides force analysis and experimental evaluation of the manufactured device. As the result of this work, we performed a simulation of rehabilitation scenario with the developed wearable prototype.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Mechanical Engineering, Korea University of Technology and Education, 1600 Chungjeolno, Cheonan, Chungnam, Korea

    Igor Gaponov, Dmitry Popov, Seung Jun Lee & Jee-Hwan Ryu

Authors
  1. Igor Gaponov
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  2. Dmitry Popov
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  3. Seung Jun Lee
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  4. Jee-Hwan Ryu
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jee-Hwan Ryu.

Additional information

Recommended by Guest Editor Sungwan Kim. This work was partially supported by the project "Development of core teleoperation technologies for maintaining and repairing tasks in nuclear power plants" funded by the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy of S. Korea, the Industrial Strategic Technology Development Program (10052967) funded by the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy of S. Korea, and by National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant funded by the Korea government (MSIP)(No. NRF-2013R1A2A1A03069658).

Igor Gaponov received his BS degree in Automation and Control from the Kursk State Technical University, Russia in 2006, and his MS and PhD degrees in Mechanical Engineering from Korea University of Technology and Education in 2008 and 2011, respectively. He is currently an Assistant Professor at the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Korea University of Technology and Education. His research interests include exosuits and assistive devices, human-machine interaction, and nonlinear control.

Dmitry Popov received his BS and MS degrees in Robotics and Mechatronics from the Moscow State Technical University “STANKIN” in 2009 and 2011, respectively, and his MS and PhD degrees in Mechanical Engineering from Korea University of Technology and Education in 2011 and 2014, respectively. He is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University. His research interests include robotics, human-machine interaction, and novel actuation systems.

Seung Jun Lee received his BS and MS degrees from the School of Mechanical Engineering at Korea University of Technology and Education, in 2014 and 2016, respectively. His research interests include robotics, automation, control and novel actuation systems.

Jee-Hwan Ryu received his BS degree in Mechanical Engineering from Inha University, Rep. of South Korea in 1995, and his MS and PhD degrees in Mechanical Engineering from Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), Taejon, Korea, in 1995 and 2002, respectively. He is currently a Professor at the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Korea University of Technology and Education. His research interests include haptics, telerobotics and teleoperation, exosuits, and flexible manipulators.

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Gaponov, I., Popov, D., Lee, S.J. et al. Auxilio: A portable cable-driven exosuit for upper extremity assistance. Int. J. Control Autom. Syst. 15, 73–84 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12555-016-0487-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12555-016-0487-7

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