Toward Personal Affordable Exoskeletons With Force Control Capabilities

This paper presents a design concept for affordable exoskeletons without renouncing to advanced interaction control modalities based on force control technologies. Affordability is reached by (1) lowering the motor requirements, thanks to a smart mechanical design, (2) lowering the sensing requirements, thanks to extensive use of microprocessor DMA, and (3) using low-cost computational platforms. A main finding of this work is that by lowering the motor requirements the exoskeleton improves its inherent force controllability.