Power Augmentation and Rehabilitation Exoskeleton Robot based on Variable Stiffness Soft Actuators

Abstract

Rehabilitation and helping disable humans are critically important to ensuring the well-being of many people. Technologies that support that should be easy to use, low-cost, and highly robust. The goal of this paper is to explain the design of a completely soft exoskeleton glove for power augmentation and rehabilitation, based on new soft pneumatic actuators with variable stiffness. In this work, curved extensor and contraction pneumatic soft artificial muscles were used, which showed that these muscles are ideal for constructing the soft exoskeleton. This novel artificial muscles of variable stiffness were formed by combining the proposed bending soft actuators with the soft artificial muscle contraction. The proposed exoskeleton will perform multi-gripping and multi-pinching with movements of hook and table top grasp. This exoskeleton is designed to fit the size of an adult's hand without mechanical adjustment. Hand signals of electromyography (EMG) are tested for confirmation of the assistive force for the proposed prototype.