Quasi-Direct Drive Actuation for a Lightweight Hip Exoskeleton with High Backdrivability and High Bandwidth.

ABSTRACT: High-performance actuators are crucial to enable mechanical versatility of wearable robots, which are required to be lightweight, highly backdrivable, and with high bandwidth. State-of-the-art actuators, e.g., series elastic actuators (SEAs), have to compromise bandwidth to improve compliance (i.e., backdrivability). We describe the design and human-robot interaction modeling of a portable hip exoskeleton based on our custom quasi-direct drive (QDD) actuation (i.e., a high torque density motor with low ratio gear). We also present a model-based performance benchmark comparison of representative actuators in terms of torque capability, control bandwidth, backdrivability, and force tracking accuracy. This paper aims to corroborate the underlying philosophy of "design for control", namely met

SUBMITTER: Yu S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7971415 | biostudies-literature | 2020

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature