A review of upper-limb soft exosuit

Abstract

A rigid exoskeleton has been developed for decades, and its feasibility has been proven in many areas, such as rehabilitation. Unlike the rigid exoskeleton, the soft exosuit provides a new insight for wearable robotics development and has drawn much attention as the external muscles instead of exoskeletons, especially for supporting users activities of daily living (ADL) and human body augmentation. This paper reviews the upper-limb soft exosuit studies in the last three years, including the core technologies and the current challenges that need to be addressed. Then, the actuator designs were described, including motor-tendon unit, pneumatic artificial muscle, hydraulic artificial muscle, and textile-based actuation. Their advantages and disadvantages were given and the applications were listed. Also, as the other part of core technologies described in this paper, the controller design which contains low-level and high-level control was discussed. Finally, the challenges were listed, which could be the further directions of research.