MODELING A SUBJECT WEARING AN INDUSTRIAL TRUNK SUPPORT EXOSKELETON

The paper presents a model of a human body wearing an industrial trunk support exoskeleton based on a pneumatically actuated prototype designed and constructed at the Politecnico of Turin Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering (DIMEAS). Developed using commercial software, this innovative model was used to investigate the movement, mass and inertia parameters of the wearer’s trunk with and without the exoskeleton. These considerations are always very important for control system design. Actuation units are located at each hip joint, consist of pneumatic motors and toothed belt drives, and feature a particular structure to respect the physiological difference between the hip joint and the lumbo-sacral joint. Preliminary simulation results are in good agreement with the results obtained from earlier numerical models. The simulation technique illustrated here is faster than previous approaches, as a CAD human body model can be imported directly into a software environment and then evaluated.