• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers A
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• v.39 no.6
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• pp.617-624
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• 2015

This paper describes the development of a wearable robot to assist the elbow muscle for use by elderly workers in aging societies. Various previously developed wearable robots have drawbacks in terms of their price, portability, and slow recognition of the wearer's intention. In this paper, emphasis is placed on the following features to minimize these drawbacks. The first feature is that an actuator is attached only at the elbow joint that withstands the highest moment during arm motion to reduce the weight, volume, and price of the robot and increase its practicality. The second is that operation of the wearable robot is divided into two modes, a tracking mode and a muscle strengthening mode, and the robot can automatically switch between these modes by analyzing the wearer's intention through the brachial muscle strength measuring device developed in this study. The assistive performance of the developed wearable robot is experimentally verified by motion tracking experiments without an external load and muscle strengthening experiments with an external load. During the muscle strengthening experiments, the power of the muscle of the upper arm is measured by a commercial electromyography (EMG) sensor. Motion tracking performance at a speed of $120^{\circ}/s$ and muscle assistance of over 60 % were obtained using our robot.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Precision Engineering
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• v.33 no.10
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• pp.837-843
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• 2016

This paper presents a position control strategy for a pump-controlled electro-hydrostatic actuator (EHA) using feedforward control with disturbance compensation. As the disturbance observer is used to estimate nonlinear dynamics of EHA, which has valve-opening conditionals, as well as external disturbances, an additional feedforward control is adopted to achieve rapid response. The effectiveness of the proposed control strategy is verified through experiment using an EHA test bench. The proposed controller shows better tracking performance compared with a conventional PID controller.