2019 年 85 巻 871 号 p. 18-00411
This research aims to develop a human-wearable type equipment that enables people to perform accurate motion without assistance of others. The equipment can be used for manually processing such as welding, rehabilitation, meal care for people with disabilities etc. The proposed equipment consists of a wire-driven mechanism with rotational degree of freedom. Thus, the equipment is expected to be lightweight and easy to wear. Although a wire-driven mechanism is generally required to adjust the wire tensions by actuators, the proposed mechanism can adjust the tensions by a constant-force spring device. As a result, the proposed wire-driven mechanism can move passively by external operation without complicated force control. Furthermore, the wire-driven mechanism can control its position correctly. Thus, while the proposed mechanism can be passively operated, it can assist the movement of people to draw accurate trajectories so as to follow target paths and motion. In this research, the proposed equipment was fabricated for assistance of positioning motion of forearm and experiments of drawing some trajectories were performed. The experiments were conducted with and without the motion assistance and were evaluated based on the error between the actual drawn and target trajectories. As a result, the average and maximum errors induced with the fabricated equipment was smaller than those without the motion assist. Therefore, the proposed equipment was available for human motion assistance.
