This paper presents advantages of introducing elbow-joints misalignments in an exoskeleton for upper limb rehabilitation. Typicalexoskeletons are characterized by axes of the device as much as possible aligned to the rotational axes of human articulations. This approach leads to advantages in terms of movements and torques decoupling, but can lead to limitations nearby the elbow singular configuration. A proper elbow axes misalignment between the exoskeleton and the human can improve the quality of collaborative rehabilitation therapies, in which a correct torque transmission from human articulations to mechanical joints of the device is required to react to torques generated by the patient.

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This paper presents ABLE, an innovative exoskeleton for the upper limb currently under development at CEA-LIST Interactive Robotics Unit. Its distinctive high performance mechanical transmissions — screw and cable patented arrangement — and its integrated architecture makes it the very first of its category. The first 4 axis model is described here but more complete models are already planned: a 7 axis model as well as portable versions. Its back-drivable, high efficiency, low inertia actuators provide a high capacity (around 40 N continuous effort at the hand) and allow hybrid force-position control without requiring any force sensor. Its first application is currently a research program in rehabilitation (BRAHMA project) and professional use is already in view. Assistance tasks for disabled persons (carrying a bottle) are also typical tasks to be performed by ABLE as well as intuitive telerobotics, haptic device for VR, and sport training, etc. Furthermore, its versatility and simple design allow industrial versions to become soon available.

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In this paper, we proposed a novel approach to control the famous PUMA manipulator with an arm exoskeleton which has been developed to enable force-feedback teleoperation and has totally different structures and dimensions from PUMA. We presented the hardware configuration and software implementation of the whole system, and then a particular issue was associated with workspace matching, which proved to be the key step for different structure based master/slave manipulator control. Finally, the conclusion was discussed, as well as the prospect of future work.

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Many kinds of power-assist robots have been developed in order to assist daily life motions of the elderly or physically weak persons. A human upper-limb has 7 degrees of freedom to achieve various tasks dexterously. Therefore, to assist all upper-limb joint motions of a human, the upper-limb power-assist robot is required to have 7DOF. On the other hand, to achieve a desired task, a person moves own hand to the desired position and orientation. For this reason, the hand position or hand force must be focused to be controlled by the upper-limb power-assist robots. However, the hand position or hand force is 6-dimensional vector, so the 7DOF upper-limb power-assist robot has a redundancy and in general, a pseudo-inverse matrix is used in the control. In this paper, the torque optimization for an upper-limb power-assist exoskeleton robot using the pseudo-inverse matrix is discussed. The effectiveness of the proposed method was evaluated by the experiments.

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The goal of this project is to develop an upper limb exoskeletal orthosis destinated to help disabled population to achieve arm movements. This orthosis is principally designed for people suffering from myopathy and muscle degeneration. Such patients cannot generate enough force to move alone their arm. This poster presents a new approach to control the exoskeleton using pressure sensors.

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