Overview Presentation Video

An overview of my research is explained in my presentation video below. Please look for each research page if you want more detailed contents.

Introduction

Due to significant improvements in robot components in terms of size and performance, technologies for wearable devices have received great attention and have been developed for various purposes.

In the wearable device development process,

it is required to satisfy two different kinds of performance factors:

  • Robot usability

  • Robot functionality

It is because, unlike other devices, the wearable device should be worn on the human body. For instance, in hand wearable robot research, the researchers have aimed for making compact, light, and soft device to guarantee the usability. For the functionality, on the other hand, they have attempted to design the robot that assists a sufficient number of grasp types with enough grasping force.

Designing the robot that satisfies both performance factors is a challenging issue because of an inevitable trade-off between keeping the usability with less number of actuators and keeping the functionality by using numerous high-force actuators.

For this reason, I aimed to solve the this trade-off issue, with the hope that wearable robots could go beyond research and help a variety of people in the real world.

Aim of my researches

Aim of my researches during the doctoral course can be described as

Researches to solve the trade-off between the performance and the complexity of the wearable robots.

Here are some studies I`ve done or currently working on to solve this trade-off issue:

  • Tendon Driven Actuator for the soft robots [Link]
  • Mechanism Studies
    • Under-actuated Tendon-driven mechanism [Link]
    • Assist Device using high-force transmission ratio [Link]
  • State Estimation with Limited Sensors [Link]
  • A Hybrid Rigid-Soft hand wearable robot [Link]

Please look for each individual research pages for the details of reseach contents.