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Differential Soft Sensor-Based Measurement of Interactive Force and Assistive Torque for a Robotic Hip Exoskeleton

With the emerging of wearable robots, the safety and effectiveness of human-robot physical interaction have attracted extensive attention. Recent studies suggest that online measurement of the interaction force between the robot and the human body is essential to the aspects above in wearable exoske...

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Autores principales: Wang, Sun’an, Zhang, Binquan, Yu, Zhenyuan, Yan, Yu’ang
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MDPI 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8512818/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34640867
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/s21196545
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author Wang, Sun’an
Zhang, Binquan
Yu, Zhenyuan
Yan, Yu’ang
author_facet Wang, Sun’an
Zhang, Binquan
Yu, Zhenyuan
Yan, Yu’ang
author_sort Wang, Sun’an
collection PubMed
description With the emerging of wearable robots, the safety and effectiveness of human-robot physical interaction have attracted extensive attention. Recent studies suggest that online measurement of the interaction force between the robot and the human body is essential to the aspects above in wearable exoskeletons. However, a large proportion of existing wearable exoskeletons monitor and sense the delivered force and torque through an indirect-measure method, in which the torque is estimated by the motor current. Direct force/torque measuring through low-cost and compact wearable sensors remains an open problem. This paper presents a compact soft sensor system for wearable gait assistance exoskeletons. The contact force is converted into a voltage signal by measuring the air pressure within a soft pneumatic chamber. The developed soft force sensor system was implemented on a robotic hip exoskeleton, and the real-time interaction force between the human thigh and the exoskeleton was measured through two differential soft chambers. The delivered torque of the hip exoskeleton was calculated based on a characterization model. Experimental results suggested that the sensor system achieved direct force measurement with an error of 10.3 ± 6.58%, and torque monitoring for a hip exoskeleton which provided an understanding for the importance of direct force/torque measurement for assistive performance. Compared with traditional rigid force sensors, the proposed system has several merits, as it is compact, low-cost, and has good adaptability to the human body due to the soft structure.
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spelling pubmed-85128182021-10-14 Differential Soft Sensor-Based Measurement of Interactive Force and Assistive Torque for a Robotic Hip Exoskeleton Wang, Sun’an Zhang, Binquan Yu, Zhenyuan Yan, Yu’ang Sensors (Basel) Article With the emerging of wearable robots, the safety and effectiveness of human-robot physical interaction have attracted extensive attention. Recent studies suggest that online measurement of the interaction force between the robot and the human body is essential to the aspects above in wearable exoskeletons. However, a large proportion of existing wearable exoskeletons monitor and sense the delivered force and torque through an indirect-measure method, in which the torque is estimated by the motor current. Direct force/torque measuring through low-cost and compact wearable sensors remains an open problem. This paper presents a compact soft sensor system for wearable gait assistance exoskeletons. The contact force is converted into a voltage signal by measuring the air pressure within a soft pneumatic chamber. The developed soft force sensor system was implemented on a robotic hip exoskeleton, and the real-time interaction force between the human thigh and the exoskeleton was measured through two differential soft chambers. The delivered torque of the hip exoskeleton was calculated based on a characterization model. Experimental results suggested that the sensor system achieved direct force measurement with an error of 10.3 ± 6.58%, and torque monitoring for a hip exoskeleton which provided an understanding for the importance of direct force/torque measurement for assistive performance. Compared with traditional rigid force sensors, the proposed system has several merits, as it is compact, low-cost, and has good adaptability to the human body due to the soft structure. MDPI 2021-09-30 /pmc/articles/PMC8512818/ /pubmed/34640867 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/s21196545 Text en © 2021 by the authors. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
spellingShingle Article
Wang, Sun’an
Zhang, Binquan
Yu, Zhenyuan
Yan, Yu’ang
Differential Soft Sensor-Based Measurement of Interactive Force and Assistive Torque for a Robotic Hip Exoskeleton
title Differential Soft Sensor-Based Measurement of Interactive Force and Assistive Torque for a Robotic Hip Exoskeleton
title_full Differential Soft Sensor-Based Measurement of Interactive Force and Assistive Torque for a Robotic Hip Exoskeleton
title_fullStr Differential Soft Sensor-Based Measurement of Interactive Force and Assistive Torque for a Robotic Hip Exoskeleton
title_full_unstemmed Differential Soft Sensor-Based Measurement of Interactive Force and Assistive Torque for a Robotic Hip Exoskeleton
title_short Differential Soft Sensor-Based Measurement of Interactive Force and Assistive Torque for a Robotic Hip Exoskeleton
title_sort differential soft sensor-based measurement of interactive force and assistive torque for a robotic hip exoskeleton
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8512818/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34640867
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/s21196545
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