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Scale Force Control of an Exoskeleton for Human Performance Augmentation

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Abstract

Exoskeletons for human performance augmentation have been widely applied in many environments, ranging from military, industry, to construction. For load-carrying augmentation exoskeletons, one of the key issues is to control the human-robot interaction (HRI) force. This paper firstly proposes a unified framework for scale force control (SFC) of human-bearing augmentation exoskeleton (HBAE) and robot-bearing augmentation exoskeleton (RBAE). Furthermore, a mid-level SFC method was proposed, in the light of both cognitive and physical HRIs (cHRI and pHRI). On this basis, a hybrid low-level controller was designed for load-carrying exoskeletons (LCEs). Finally, the proposed method was simulated on an LCE. The simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our SFC approach: the pilot is always provided with an arbitrary scaled-down interaction force, regardless of the load state.

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Code or Data Availability

The code is available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant number: 61903131 and 71904047) (Lin Lang, Chunbaixue Yang), and China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (Grant number: 2020 M683715) (Lin Lang).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. National University of Defense Technology, Changsha, 410072, China

    Lin Lang, Junhao Xiao, Huimin Lu & Zongtan Zhou

  2. Hunan University of Finance and Economics, Changsha, 410000, China

    Lin Lang & Chunbaixue Yang

  3. CNNP Liaoning Nuclear Power Co., Ltd., Changsha, China

    Yunshu Sun

Authors
  1. Lin Lang
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  2. Junhao Xiao
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  3. Yunshu Sun
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  4. Huimin Lu
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Contributions

Lin Lang: Coding and writing

Junhao Xiao: Coding and writing

Yunshu Sun: English writing

Huimin Lu: Review and editing

Zongtan Zhou: Investigation, as well as review and editing

Chunbaixue Yang: Review and editing

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Junhao Xiao.

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Lang, L., Xiao, J., Sun, Y. et al. Scale Force Control of an Exoskeleton for Human Performance Augmentation. J Intell Robot Syst 106, 22 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10846-022-01611-6

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