As exoskeletons are used in human rehabilitation, there are many challenges in the development of exoskeletons in terms of the connection their structure to the human body. These challenges are affected by many factors such as interaction of the exoskeleton and the human body, and exoskeleton actuators way of assisting muscles. Moreover, every human has her/his own movement and force pattern; thus, how experimental data can be extracted from each human body is another challenging issue. This project attempts to tackle some of the challenges in developing an exoskeleton device using simulation methods and software. Simulation can help researchers to develop exoskeleton structures and can give them insight into how this device can help muscle movement. Therefore, a simulation based method is presented to design and analyze the parameters of an exoskeleton and its wearer’s kinetics and kinematics.
The proposed method consists of four stages. In the first stage, the human model is edited to create a human-exoskeleton model. In the next stage, OpenSim is integrated with MATLAB in order to simulate the effect of exoskeletons on the human body. Considering the sole effect of an exoskeleton on each individual subject with his/her specific characteristics, stages three and four are conducted. In the third stage, the experimental data of a subject is produced by motion capture systems. The computed muscle control (CMC) tool of the OpenSim has been applied to obtain the muscle control values . In stage four, the closed loop simulation of a human-exoskeleton is performed using the results of the third stage. In addition, in this stage, the controller is implemented and simulated to obtain control parameters for the exoskeleton actuators.