Kinematic Design and Analysis for a Macaque Upper-Limb Exoskeleton with Shoulder Joint Alignment

An exoskeleton design for a rhesus macaque subject is motivated, presented, and analyzed. As kinematic properties of the macaque's upper-limb have not been thoroughly studied, this paper introduces methods to determine properties relevant to exoskeleton design. Alignment with biological joints is critical for exoskeleton performance, but there are no accepted kinematic joint models for rhesus macaques. An algorithm is introduced which uses motion capture data to determine an appropriate model for the shoulder complex. An exoskeleton which incorporates this model is introduced, then analyzed. As joint speeds of macaques are also not well studied, a proposed analysis finds an upper bound on the joint speeds required to realize a given end effector speed in an arbitrary direction for all configurations within the workspace.