Exoskeleton

A wearable mechanical structure whose joints line up with the body's, used to assist motion or to record it.

An exoskeleton is a mechanical structure worn on the outside of the body, with its joints positioned to match the wearer's own. A powered exoskeleton, with motors built in, can assist a person's movement — used in rehabilitation training, helping people with limited mobility walk, or reducing the load on a worker carrying heavy items. A passive exoskeleton, unpowered and fitted only with encoders, instead precisely records the wearer's joint angles. This second kind matters a lot in embodied AI: an exoskeleton built to be isomorphic with a robot arm (matching its number of joints and proportions) lets a person perform a motion while wearing it, and the readings can be mapped directly to robot joint commands — used for teleoperation and collecting demonstration data, with better accuracy and lower latency than vision-based motion capture. Some exoskeletons also provide force feedback, letting the operator feel the resistance the robot encounters.

ExampleAirExo uses a low-cost exoskeleton to teleoperate a dual-arm robot, and HOMIE uses an isomorphic exoskeleton cockpit to control a humanoid robot's upper body.

Also called

Exoskeleton Robot, Powered Exoskeleton

Related

Exoskeleton Teleoperation · AirExo · HOMIE: Humanoid Loco-Manipulation with Isomorphic Exoskeleton Cockpit · Teleoperation · Leader-Follower Teleoperation · Motion Capture

Sources

Powered exoskeleton - Wikipedia