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DARPA Warrior Web Program
This project is motivated by DARPA Warrior Web Program.
- There has a been a lot of research into exoskeletons over the years to alleviate heavy loads that soldiers should burden, but strapping a person into a robotic outfit just isn't practical in a combat zone yet.
- DARPA's Warrior Web program aims to build a lightweight suit that improves a soldier's endurance and overall effectiveness, while preventing injuries.
- The main goals by developing the warrior web are
- To prevent and reduce musculoskeletal injuries.
- To augment positive work done by the muscles and reduce the physical burden
- You can see the details on http://www.darpa.mil/Our_Work/DSO/Programs/Warrior_Web.aspx
Harvard Exosuit
In order to develop an under-suit that doesn’t interrupt wearer’s free movement, researchers are trying to make it soft and deformable, but still capable of applying force to body joints. Among several different projects in the Warrior Web program, I focused on Harvard exosuit.
- Harvard Biodesign group, one of a project groups in this program, is trying to make their warrior web suit soft and light, and they call their suit harvard exosuit.
- Experimental data proved that it can help loaded walking by reducing metabolic costs.
Challenges
As it is a new approach to assist human gait with deformable structure, there are many challenges when developing the exosuit. The examples of the challenges are
- It is difficult to analyze the effectivness of exist.
- It is difficult to find the optimal input force for actuators to reduce the metabolic cost
- It is difficult to identify the effect of change of design parameters
The reasons for the challenges are
- The under-suit may be soft and deformable
- Hard to identify how external actuation assists loaded gait.
- Experimental metabolic cost data is inconsistent case by case
Project Goals
Through this project, I tried to resolve the challenges in developing exosuit with Opensim simulation. Simulation can help developing soft wearable exosuit as it can gives an intuition on how exosuit help muscles, and what are the key features that one should care about when developing the suit.
I hope this project will construct a systematic way of analyzing and designing exosuit.
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soft wearable device. The goal that I set as a starting point are
- Evaluate the effectiveness of wearing active actuator on metabolic cost reduction during loaded walking.
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- Explain how exosuit can help loaded gait.
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- Verify the impact of changes in design parameters.
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- Find optimal control inputs for exosuit actuators.
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- Evaluate the effectiveness of Biarticular actuator
Strategy
Experimental data
Two different types of data was were collected from a same subject.
- One gait cycle of loaded walking (From left toe off to next left toe off)
- One gait cycle of unloaded walking (From left toe off to next left toe off)
For both data, walking speed is identical, and mass of the load for loaded weight walking was 38kg.
Modeling
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