Wearable Exoskeleton Systems: Design, Control and Applications

Wearable exoskeletons are electro-mechanical systems designed to assist, augment, or enhance motion and mobility in a variety of human motion applications and scenarios. The applications cover a wide range of domains including medical devices for patient rehabilitation training in trauma recovery, movement aids for disabled persons, personal care robots for providing daily living assistance, and reduction of physical burden in industrial, manufacturing, security and military applications. The development of effective and affordable wearable exoskeletons poses several design, control and modelling challenges to researchers and manufacturers. Novel technologies are therefore being developed in a wide range of applications including adaptive motion controllers, human-robot interaction control, biological sensors and actuators, and materials and structures.

In this second edition of Wearable Exoskeleton Systems: Design, control and applications, the editors and authors have updated the original chapters with advances, technology breakthroughs and innovations in exoskeleton development which have taken place since the first edition was published in 2018. New chapters have been added on novel wearable sensing technologies, performance assessment methods, recent commercial developments, lessons learned and emerging trends.

This updated reference will be of interest to engineers, scientists and researchers in academia and industry, and advanced students and lecturers working in the fields of robotics, haptics, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, mechatronics, sensing, control engineering, computer vision, human computer interaction, AI, cognitive engineering, medical engineering, electronic engineering, and mobile and wireless engineering. It will also be of interest to researchers and scientists working on applications areas such as construction, manufacturing, rehabilitation, forestry, security and the military, as well as exoskeleton engineers and designers, software developers, safety professionals, and policymakers and standardization professionals.

Shaoping Bai is a professor at the Department of Materials and Production, Aalborg University, Denmark. He is the founder of the AAU Center for Robotics Research (now AAU Robotics) and the founder and CSO of BIOX ApS. He has worked on several Danish and EU research projects in robotics and welfare technology. He is an editorial board member for several journals and has published extensively in peer-reviewed journals and conferences.

Gurvinder Singh Virk is chief scientist at Huzhou Wuxing District Intelligent Robot Innovation Research Institute, China where he is developing wearable exoskeletons for healthy ageing applications. He is also adjunct professor at Huzhou Institute of Zhejiang University, China, and managing director of Endoenergy Systems, UK and India. He is deputy chairman and trustee of the UK registered charity CLAWAR, aiming to advance robotics globally for public benefit, and currently leads several international robot standardization activities.

Thomas Sugar is associate dean for the Barrett Honors College at ASU Polytechnic, and professor and graduate program chair for systems engineering and robotics and autonomous systems in the School of Manufacturing Systems and Networks at Arizona State University, USA. In industry, he has worked as a project engineer for W.L. Gore and Associates. He has co-led the Wearable Robotics Association and is an ASME fellow and an IEEE senior member.