Exoskeleton Design & Control for BMI Study

Introduction

The integration of a brain-machine interface (BMI) and an exoskeleton has the potential to promote the understanding of fundamental principles in the neural control of movements, as well as to motivate a new generation of rehabilitation or power augmentation exoskeleton systems. This research focuses on the design and control of a multiple degrees of freedom (DOF) upper limb exoskeleton for BMI macaques to achieve: 1) data acquisition (by torque control) and 2) motion actuation (by impedance/position control), providing proprioceptive feedbacks to help establish a closed-loop BMI system. Collaborators are researchers from the labs of Professor Jose Carmena and Professor Claire Tomlin at UC Berkeley working on, respectively, neural decoder design and hybrid system scheme identication and control. Our effort by now has been devoted to design and control of the upper-limb exoskeleton including kinematic design and analysis, torque reflecting actuator design, as well as hardware fabrication.

 

Research Topics

6-DOF Passive Exoskeleton for Macaque Upper-limb
Motorized Exoskeleton Design for Macaque Upper-limb
3D Target Presenting System

 

Researchers

Junkai Lu Graduate Student Email  
Kevin Haninger Graduate Student Email Homepage
       
Recent graduates:      
Joonbum Bae UNIST, Korea Email Homepage
Wenjie Chen FANUC Corporation Email Homepage

 

National Science Foundation (NSF)