Magnetorheological fluid (MRF) is a smart material that has the property of changing its viscosity when exposed to a magnetic field. By placing this fluid into a sealed cylinder with an electromagnet piston as a core, a controllable resistance motion dampener can be created. A novel exoskeleton mechanical power transmission system was designed, utilizing rapid prototype parts, to transmit these resistive forces to the user’s fingertips. A first iteration force feedback glove was developed and tested on human subjects for overall usability. The eventual goal of the system is to provide an alternative force producing system for exercises and rehabilitation. The entire system is lightweight, low power, and easily portable

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This paper reports support effects of an exoskeleton system for activities of a hand and an upper limb of a healthy person. The support system augments human forces of a hand, a wrist joint and an elbow joint based on bioelectric potential of each muscle so that the upper limb could be assisted by the exoskeleton with a certain rate of wearer’s force. Actuators in the assistive system are replaced with powerful ones to supports human hand, wrist and elbow activities with larger force and torque. Through experiments it was confirmed that a wearer receives physical support from the system for activities of a hand, a wrist and an elbow joint and then we evaluate rate of assistance by comparing the magnitude of the bioelectric potential between under a supported phase and under an unsupported phase.

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This paper discusses about a haptic communication system. Recently the haptic information is attracted attention as the third sense of communication information. And the real world haptics is the key technology for the haptic communication. However, the present approach of the teleoperation system postulates that human touches the remote object via the device like as the remote surgery. Considering using the real world haptics for person-to-person haptic communication tool, the exoskeleton-endoskeleton haptic system is necessary. Thus in this paper, we focus the exoskeleton-endoskeleton haptic system and bilateral control in the human modal space is proposed. The availability of the proposed method is shown by experiments.

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Research performed in the area of haptics has produced some remarkable results with a variety of haptic devices. However, haptic-based applications are designed to consider only a particular haptic device. Therefore, the functionality of a haptic-based system is limited by the chosen device’s features, such as workspace, device’s inertia, friction, number of points of interaction, number of degrees of freedom, and maximum force that can be exerted. In short, these haptic-based systems are limited for use with a certain haptic device. Without a doubt, the need for a software tool to adapt existing haptic-based systems to the capabilities of another haptic device is evident. On the other hand, one of the main advantages of using haptic devices is the possibility of saving data during the haptic interaction. Our proposed framework, which is called Adaptive Haptic Application (AdHapticA), deals with both issues: It automatically adapts a haptic-based system to be used with another haptic device and saves the corresponding haptic data for quantitative evaluation. The AdHapticA framework can be used to study the feasibility of certain haptic devices to meet the requirements of an application. A case study is presented to evaluate single-point interaction and hand exoskeleton haptic devices for authentication purposes by using the same virtual scenario. The applicability of the proposed framework is shown, and the results obtained from the haptic data are captured when a particular application is performed with either single-point (desktop device) or multipoint interaction devices (hand exoskeleton). Therefore, the results have shown that current hand exoskeleton devices are less suitable for tasks that require a certain level of precision, like haptic-biometric-based tasks.

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Rehabilitation devices require a very precise actuating system. In this paper, a flexible joint actuator is proposed as an actuating system of an intelligent active orthosis. To generate joint torque as desired, a spring is installed between a motor and human joint and the motor is controlled to have a proper spring deflection for torque control. When the desired torque is zero, the motor should follow human joint motion which requires that the friction and inertia of the motor are compensated. The human joint and body part represent the load to the flexible joint actuator. They interact with environment and their parameters are not fixed. The controller for the flexible joint actuator must operate under these conditions.

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