Abstract
In this paper, we proposed a novel soft knee exoskeleton based on continuum structure. The bionic design is from the knee extension mechanism: extensor contraction stretching the patella on the gap of the femur and tibia. Concept and prototype design were presented in detail. In the continuum structure, two adjacent modules have two major degrees of freedom, which are bilateral siding and unilateral rotation. The end motion area of the continuum can meet the knee joint feature which is coupled motion with sliding and rotating between the femur and tibia. In addition, a high-power cable-driven actuator was developed to drive the exoskeleton. Tension control results indicated that the actuator can track the force quickly and accurately at fast movement. Walking experiments on two subjects wearing the proposed exoskeleton at slow, normal and fast speeds were carried out. Knee joint kinematic data show flexible and natural gait motion.
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Acknowledgment
This work was supported by the National Key R&D Program of China (No. 2018YFF0300606, 2018YFB1307302), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 91648207, 61533001), the Beijing Natural Science Foundation (No. L182001) and the Beijing Municipal Science and Technology Project (No. Z181100009218007). The authors would like to thank Y. Zhou and T. Zhang for their contributions in prototype implementation.
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Zhou, Z., Liu, X., Wang, Q. (2019). Concept and Prototype Design of a Soft Knee Exoskeleton with Continuum Structure (SoftKEX). In: Yu, H., Liu, J., Liu, L., Ju, Z., Liu, Y., Zhou, D. (eds) Intelligent Robotics and Applications. ICIRA 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11740. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27526-6_7
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