A soft exoskeleton suit to support kicking motion with pneumatic artificial muscles

Abstract

A soft exoskeleton, which consists of soft actuators without rigid components, has a potential to augment the human activity in daily life, like playing sports. In this paper, we developed a suit that can support lower limb movements with pneumatic artificial muscles (PAMs) and tested it to augment kicking motions of a ball. We confirmed that our suit could improve the kicking speed for non-expert football players.