Tina Nguyen: Lower Limb Exoskeleton

Help Us Legs: Lower Limb Exoskeleton

Tina Nguyen worked on the lower limb exoskeleton project for SURF-IT 2009 at University of California, Santa Cruz.  She has finished her 4th year at University of California, Santa Cruz majoring in Electrical Engineering.  She worked for Professor Jacob Rosen in The Bionics Lab assisting a graduate student, Jared Mednick, on the project, the lower limb exoskeleton.  The lower limb exoskeleton is ideally a low power, light weight wearable exoskeleton that will be able to help soldiers carry a heavy load.  The purpose of the suit is to allow soldiers to carry heavy loads into various terrains with reduce stress and fatigue on the body.  The exoskeleton must react to the human interface quickly using several sensors to indicate where in the structure energy must be stored or released.

Tina helped with the setup of the software, Matlab Simulink, being used for the dsPIC33FJ256GP710 microcontroller.  Using the Explorer 16 Development Board, the initial setup was to print out the angle of the potentiometer on the LCD, which measures 0 to 340 degrees.  The potentiometer would be one of the several sensors on the exoskeleton to indicate the joint angle.  Following that, Tina worked on the control system of the lower limb exoskeleton using the microcontroller.  She used the analog-to-digital conversions and general purpose I/O capabilities of the microcontroller to execute the control system.