Dual Arm Exoskeleton

Exoskeleton for upper body robotic assistance (Recupera REHA)


Technical Details

Size: 0.9m x 0.7m x 0.9m
Weight: 34,6 kg (14,3 kg exoskeleton and 20,3 kg wheelchair)
Power supply:
48 V
Actuation/ Engine:
14 active DOF (8 x BLDC Robodrive, 2x Maxon, 6x Dynamixel),
2 vibration motors for haptic feedback,
6 servo motors for force feedback hand interface
Sensors:
18 x iC-Haus MU,
6 x Honeywell FG10N,
6 ATI Nano 25,
2 capacitive touch sensors
Communication:
2 STM NUCLEO-L432KC,
RS485 Dynamixel,
10 FPGA stacks for distributed joint control,
2 DFKI ZynqBrain V1.1 as central control computer,
communication over NdlCom.

Organisational Details

Partner:

rehaworks GmbH

Sponsor: German Aerospace Center e.V.
Grant number: 01IM14006A
Application Field: Assistance- and Rehabilitation Systems
Space Robotics
Related Projects: IMMI
Intelligent Man-Machine Interface - Adaptive Brain-reading for assistive robotics (05.2010- 04.2015)
Recupera REHA
Full-body exoskeleton for upper body robotic assistance (09.2014- 12.2017)
VI-Bot
Virtual Immersion for holistic feedback control of semi-autonomous robots (01.2008- 12.2010)
Capio
Dual-arm exoskeleton (01.2011- 12.2013)
Related Robots: Full Body Exoskeleton
Exoskeleton for upper body robotic assistance
Exoskeleton active (CAPIO)
Capio Upper Body Exoskeleton for Teleoperation
Exoskeleton Passive (CAPIO)
Upper body Human-Machine-Interface (HMI) for tele-operation
Exoskeleton Passive (VI-Bot)
Upper body exoskeleton (right arm) for motion capturing
Related Software: CAD-2-SIM
Computer Aided Design To Simulation
pySPACE
Signal Processing and Classification Environment written in Python
reSPACE
Reconfigurable Signal Processing and Classification Environment

System description

The Recupera active dual arm exoskeleton (Photo: Annemarie Popp, DFKI)

The active dual arm exoskeleton is a human-machine-interface developed to enhance and optimize the workflow of upper body rehabilitation. The exoskeleton has five contact points to the operator and the kinematic structure follows the human movements of the arms. In order to achieve the autonomy required for rehabilitation applications, all processing is performed by an embedded computing system. The kinematic structure has five active degrees of freedom at each arm

Further Details:

  • 3-hierarchical-layer-based control architecture. Robust cascaded velocity-position-current control on the low-level, dynamic control, gravity compensation and biosignal integration at mid-level (for the upper body) and controllability over a Web GUI at high-level
  • 3 therapy modes:
    • With the Master-Slave mode it is possible to control and move one arm with the other, resembling the classical mirror therapy approach.
    • With the Teach-In and Replay mode movements from the arms can be tracked and saved, in order to replay them once or several times. The replayed trajectories can be triggered via EMG or EEG.
    • In the gravity compensated free running mode the arms can be moved at will.  Models of the human arm can be activated in order to compensate for the weight of the user’s arms

Videos

Recupera-REHA: First patient tests

Together with the project partner rehaworks, first tests with stroke patients were made. All 3 therapy modes were tested.

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last updated 07.11.2023
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