Design of motion trajectory of an arm exoskeleton

Abstract

This paper concerns the kinematics and dynamics of an arm exoskeleton used for human rehabilitation. The biomechanics of the upper arm was studied, and the nine degrees of freedom model of upper arm was obtained using Denavit–Hartenberg notation. The mass and inertial parameters were obtained from recent literature, and these parameters were used for modelling human arm in SolidWorks and MATLAB-Simulink packages. The inverse kinematics of the arm exoskeleton was solved in the previous paper Winter (Biomechanics and motor control of human movement. Wiley, New York, 2009, and this model was implemented in this study. The arm angular velocity profile was selected within the time and speed restriction. By comparing three variants of motion with visualization, we indicated the change of joints angles. Then, the torques in each arm joints with and without exoskeleton were calculated. The obtained results demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed approach that can be utilized to analyse the kinematics and dynamics of exoskeletons for the purpose of selection of their actuators.