Instrumenting complex exoskeletons for improved human-robot interaction

Gone is the era where robots were strictly used for industrial automation, working in a single, isolated welding cell from an assembly line, away from their human overlords and relegated to repetitive brainless preprogrammed tasks. Modern robotics in contrast, is rapidly evolving in a more inclusive way for the robots, bringing them closer to us humans, and opening in the process a huge and diverse spectrum of applications. We have developed a generic, low level control (LLC) real-time system for the sensor data acquisition and control of complex robots together with the development of versatile electronic hardware modules. In this article, we explain existing exoskeletons, propose generic solutions to challenges considered for safe physical human-robot interaction, and describe the instrumentation and integration of our real-time system and electronic hardware modules that we developed and successfully deployed in three exoskeleton systems.