Journal of Bionic Engineering
Volume 14, Issue 4, October 2017, Pages 706-715
Bas J. de Kruif1,2, Emilio Schmidhauser3, Konrad S. Stadler3, Leonard W. O’Sullivan1
1. School of Design & Health Research Institute, University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland
2. Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research, Equipment for Additive Manufacturing, 5600 HE, Eindhoven, The Netherlands
3. Zurich University of Applied Sciences, School of Engineering, 8401 CH, Winterthur, Switzerland
Abstract The aim of our work is to improve the existing user-exoskeleton models by introducing a simulation architecture that can simulate its dynamic interaction, thereby altering the initial motion of the user. A simulation architecture is developed that uses the musculoskeletal models from OpenSim, and that implements an exoskeleton control algorithm and human response model in Matlab. The musculoskeletal models need to be extended with the response of a user to external forces to simulate the dy-namic interaction. A set of experiments was performed to fit this response model. A validation test showed that more than 80% of the variance of the motion could be explained. With the human response model in the combined simulation architecture, a simulation in which an object connects with the exoskeleton or with the human is performed. The effect of the exoskeleton on, among others, muscle excitation and altered motion can be assessed with this architecture. Our work can be used to better predict the effect an exoskeleton has on the user.
Key words: human-exoskeleton modelling human response modelling exoskeleton musculoskeletal system exoskeleton design
Full text is available at http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1672652916604377