Simultaneous Control Framework for Humanoid Tracking Human Movement With Interacting Wearable Assistive Device

Instead of human subjects, humanoid robots can be used as human dummies to test the human-designed products. We propose a controller that uses wearable assistive devices (also referred to as exoskeletons) to reproduce human movement in the evaluation. The proposed control scheme consists two components: one is the torque controller designed for a simplified interaction model with the device, and the other is the tracking controller based on a vector field to reproduce human motion. We implemented the proposed controller on the human-sized humanoid HRP-4 and validated the feasibility of the human motion reproduction by wearing the assistive device. In the experiment, we tested the commercially available device "Muscle Suit" by using our control scheme. The experimental results showed that while the device applies its supporting strength, the humanoid robot could reproduce human movements. The assistive effect of the device was visualized effectively in our evaluation framework.