An upper-body exoskeleton with a novel shoulder mechanism for assistive applications

The paper presents the mechatronic design of an upper-body exoskeleton. The problem of shoulder mechanism design is addressed to allow the exoskeleton able to match the motion of the human shoulder complex. A novel spherical mechanism that consists of two revolute joints connected together via a double parallelogram linkage (DPL) is analyzed and designed. With the new shoulder mechanism, a four-degree-of-freedom upper-body exoskeleton is designed and constructed. Human-robot interaction control with admittance controller is described and preliminary results are presented.