Design and Control of Upper-Body Assistive Wearable Robot Using Pneumatic Artificial Muscles

Abstract

This paper describes the design and control of a soft wearable robot capable of upper-limb muscle power assistance to prevent musculoskeletal injuries while lifting a patient repeatedly during a transfer process, in which a caregiver moves from a bed to a wheelchair. To minimize the weight of the wearable robot, pneumatic muscles were applied instead of typically used motors with reduction gears. The required specifications of the pneumatic artificial muscles were defined by mechanical analysis and manufactured specially for our robot. We also designed a soft wearing suit using fabric as the primary material and minimized the hard metal frames. This robot understands the intention of the user from the specific motions through the bracelet-type sensor named Myo that contains electromyography(EMG) sensors and accelerometers, without pressing a button. Finally, the performance of the wearable robot was experimentally verified through EMG measurements.