NOVEL 6-DOF WEARABLE EXOSKELETON ARM WITH PNEUMATIC FORCE-FEEDBACK FOR BILATERAL TELEOPERATION

A particular emphasis is put on a novel wearable exoskeleton arm, ZJUESA, with 6 degrees of freedom, which is used for the robot teleoperation with the force-feedback in the unknown environment. In this external structure mechanism, the 3-revolution-prismatic-spherical (3RPS) parallel mechanism is devised from the concept of the human upper-limb anatomy and applied for the shoulder 3-DOF joint. Meanwhile, the orthogonal experiment design method is introduced for its optimal design. Aiming at enhancing the performance of teleoperation, the force feedback is employed by the pneumatic system on ZJUESA to produce the vivid feeling in addition to the soft control interface. Due to the compressibility and nonlinearity of the pneumatic force feedback system, a novel hybrid fuzzy controller for the precise force control is proposed and realized based on the Mega8 microcontroller units as the units of the distributed control system on ZJUESA. With the results of several experiments for master-slave control with force feedback, the feasibility of ZJUESA system and the effect of its hybrid fuzzy controller are verified.