Design and Testing of Standing-Sitting Exoskeleton Control System for Spinal Cord Injury Sufferers

• Main Author: Albert Mario Siahaan, Samuel
• Format: Final Project
• Language: Indonesia
• Online Access: https://digilib.itb.ac.id/gdl/view/36670
• Institution: Institut Teknologi Bandung

Nowadays, there are many cases in which inability to do standing motion independently happens due to spinal cord injury disease. Those cases causes reduction in someone’s life quality. In Indonesia, commonly used assistive devices usually are not portable and only provided in hospital. Meanwhile, some portable assistive devices have been developed but they are still too expensive. Therefore, a low-cost portable standing aids needs to be designed. The conceptual design in current research is based on CUHK-EXO that was designed and manufactured by The University of Hongkong research team with some modifications in terms of materials, geometry of components, and design parameters. Closed-loop control system of exoskeleton is constructed to ensure that the output movement of exoskeleton could fulfil joint angle reference values as kinematic characteristic of sit-to-stand and stand-to-sit motion at hip joint and knee joint as the actuated joints. Some testings have been conducted to evaluate the performance of control system. When tested without wearer, joint angles resulted from the movement of exoskeleton are relatively similar with joint angle reference values of sit-to-stand and stand-to-sit motion in terms of trend and value either at hip joint or knee joint. But, when tested with wearer, it concludes that there are still errors between the resulted joint angle values and desired characteristics at both joints. In conclusion, futher researchs need to be done to improve the control system so the output movement of exoskeleton could fulfil the desired characteristics of sit-to-stand and stand-to-sit motion when the exoskeleton is tested with wearer.