Prototypes of robot exoskeleton for assistance and rehabilitation

This activity has two main objectives: the first one is to develop prototypes of lightweight, portable, and active exoskeletons and soft exosuits to assist the motion of the upper extremities in weight-lifting tasks and for rehabilitation as well as the innovative controllers to reduce the user fatigue, the metabolic cost and improve the user ergonomic; the second one is to develop computational methods to control and to support the assessment of the post-stroke exoskeleton-mediated rehabilitation. 
For the first goal, we propose to realize a prototype, and iterate the process implementing necessary improvement, to obtain a final prototype that can be tested in a real working environment.  
The development of novel actuation stage and the exploiting of different actuators technologies will be a valuable activity to conduct in this task. The aim is to obtain an intrinsic safe and performing hardware useful to design control strategies for the human-robot interaction.  
The control system will be versatile in dealing with weights of various sizes and to accept in an intuitive way the commands from the user.  
In the last phase of project, we intend to perform experiments with real workers to assess the exoskeleton prototype real benefits in decreasing muscular effort during the job turn and in reducing metabolic cost of its user.  
For the active exosuits, we need to assess the impact of the exosuit on the wearers’ biomechanics through an extended musculoskeletal simulation in a load-lifting task, with real trajectories. Then, we will design novel soft structure to improve wearability, comfort, reliability, efficiency. The body frame and the attachments will be developed. The control strategies will be designed to improve human-robot symbiosis. 
To achieve the second goal, Wearable Robotics together with the Azienda Ospedaliera Univeritaria Pisana (AOUP) will analyse output data from rehabilitation sessions of post-stroke patients. The implementation of computational methods will support the assessment of the data and will guide the development of new strategies for controlling the exoskeleton during the rehabilitation sessions.