Abstract
Back exoskeletons can reduce low-back pain and injury for workers engaged in manual handling operations. However, conventional back exoskeletons are incompatible with human trunk kinematics, arousing uncomfortable human-exoskeleton interaction and limiting natural human movement. This article proposes a novel back exoskeleton design to solve this problem. A hyper redundant hybrid mechanism is synthesized as the exoskeleton mechanism to be compatible with the multi-DOF anatomy of the human spine. We establish the kinematic model of the coupled human-exoskeleton system and analyze the kinematic incompatibility problem. The movement of the human back is characterized by a multi-joint lumbar spine combined with a rigid thoracic spine. The proposed back exoskeleton is composed sequentially of five six-DOF passive parallel mechanisms with one cable actuation, generating active assistance in the sagittal plane and passive assistance in the coronal and transverse planes. The kinetics of the coupled human-exoskeleton system is analyzed to show effective assistance. Experimental tests on kinematic compatibility are finally implemented to demonstrate that the proposed exoskeleton allows the wearer to perform natural movements in all directions with large ranges of motion.
Published Version
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