A custom brace design to connect a user limb to an exoskeleton link with minimal discomfort

Abstract

Exoskeletons are increasingly helping people with different applications. Regardless of what they were built for, exoskeletons have a common discomfort problem from the misalignment of robot and human joints. In this paper, a fixation design for a lower extremity exoskeleton is presented. A method was proposed to determine necessary passive degrees of freedom of the designed brace system and to identify the parameters affecting interaction forces and moments between human and exoskeleton. The proposed method was validated by analyzing the human-machine interface statically and dynamically. The results show that the problem of undesired interaction forces due to misalignment may be solved theoretically with the proposed design.