Research on Exoskeletons at the TU Berlin

We present an overview of the work devoted to exoskeletons which has been performed for the last seven years at TU Berlin. Three different types of exoskeleton devices have been developed: hand and finger exoskeletons for rehabilitation, a leg exoskeleton for motion support, and an arm exoskeleton for multimodal human-computer interaction. The research has been focused on different types of control strategies and algorithms as well as on the implementation of applications. The main part of this work is devoted to using electrical muscle signals for the control systems. We present the concepts for design and application, review the main algorithms and show experimental results and first experience with applications.