An innovative sensor suit is developed, which can be conveniently put on by an operator to detect his or her motion intention by non-invasively monitoring his or her muscle conditions such as the shape, the stiffness and the density. This sensor suit is made of soft and elastic fabrics embedded with arrays of MEMS sensors such as muscle stiffness sensor, ultrasonic sensors, accelerometers and optical fiber sensors, to measure different types of human muscle conditions. Compared with conventional sensors used in man machine interfaces, the proposed sensor suit is soft, flexible, lightweight, easy to wear, accurate and reliable. More importantly, the sensor suit is auto-adaptive to an individual operator and does not impede motion against the operator. Furthermore, a failsafe mechanism using special hardware and active sensing software is incorporated in the sensor suit to ensure the safety and reliability. As a result, the sensor suit is ideal for use in man-machine systems, particularly the DARPA exoskeleton power suits. In this case, the sensor suit will be worn by the operator under the exoskeleton power suits. The sensor suit, with its distributed sensing capability, will provide accurate and reliable information about the operator’s motion intention which is needed for controlling the power suit to accurately follow the operator s motion intention.

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