Wearable upper limb exoskeletons: Generations, design challenges and task oriented synthesis

Abstract

This paper first summarizes the research work in the active and passive upper limb exoskeleton robotics that have been majorly testified in the area of assistive and rehabilitation robotics. Recent techniques have been classified with respect to the reported generations defined by scientific communities and design challenges have been retrieved out of the discussions. Further, an approach is proposed to follow natural upper limb motion of a human arm, and for this required human motion data is taken using a Kinect sensor. A two degrees-of-freedom wearable manipulator is synthesized for emulating the collected data. Simulations are shown while emulating natural motion of an arm, and a corresponding architectural concept design for an active solution is also presented.