Wearable Robot Embedded Human Muscle Activity Monitoring System and Human-Oriented Joint Torque Calculation

Abstract

Among various robotic devices, wearable robots physically interact with the musculoskeletal system of the human body. For complete paraplegic patients, the motor torque of the wearable robot is the only internal torque of the combined human-robot system and generates the motion of the human-robot. In the case of incomplete paraplegia, the joint torque generated by the human and the motor torque of the robot are combined to create the movement of the human body and the robot. Interaction torque is the assistive torque received by humans. In this paper, we introduce a soft pneumatic muscle sensor system that can measure the interaction torque between a human and a wearable robot. The system was embedded in the fabric bands of the wearable robot Angel Legs to measure muscle activity and interaction torque during robot operation. As a preliminary study, we propose a knee joint torque experiment. Additional research progress and experimental results will be presented at the conference session.