Arm-Mounted Assistive Robot for Measuring Contact Force and Evaluating Wearer Safety

Abstract

We developed a wearable assistive robot that directly measures the contact force acting between the robot and the human body, aiming to enhance the safety of such wearable devices. The force acting on the body is not directly measured, instead, it is estimated by measuring the torque acting on the robot joint in the wearable assistive robot. Despite the risk of failing to recognize dangerous forces due to modeling errors, the forces actually at work have not been examined. Here, we developed an arm-mounted assistive robot that directly measures the contact force as the distribution information to build a system and evaluate safety; in addition, the contact state between the robot and the human body was discussed. Accordingly, two experiments were conducted with 10 subjects. The first verified the contact force measurement performance of the robot, while the second demonstrated the application of contact force information to check the safety of the robot. The proposed robot can accurately measure the contact force, and the robot movement is safe under general control, for example, using the pain tolerance limit as the safety index. This eliminated the risk of not directly monitoring the forces acting on the surface of the human body. Furthermore, our result have implication for evaluating structural problems of the robot by evaluating contact conditions during movements.

Keywords

• Assistive robot
• contact force distribution
• exoskeleton
• wearable robot