Efforts to Ensure Wearer’s Safety for High-Agility Powered Exoskeleton

Abstract

To enable faster and more efficient rescue operation or transportation of goods in disaster relief missions, our research group has been developing a powered exoskeleton system for carrying heavy loads with quick and agile motion even on rough terrain. It is important to ensure the wearer’s safety when evaluating the exoskeleton’s performance on disaster relief missions. Therefore, in our research, we carried out safety design of the powered exoskeleton through risk communication across a diverse team of researchers, robot developers and operators and assessed risk in accordance with stationery risk assessment sheets used for designing safety care robots. Additionally, we conducted performance tests on indoor simulated rough terrain and outdoor simulated disaster environments, applying the standard performance test method (STM) to ensure reproducibility of tests and the wearer’s safety. Through this process, we aim to establish more effective and safe test and evaluation methods for using powered exoskeletons in disaster relief missions.