Design of a Novel All Terrains Wearable Vehicle

Transferring humans while carrying loads on all types of terrains efficiently utilizing a compact means of transportation is still a challenging task. Exoskeletons can augment human ability to carry large weights and go through unstructured areas but their speed are still limited with the human walking speed. This paper proposes the design of a novel wearable vehicle as a compact means of transportation which consists of a lower extremity exoskeleton carrying two motorized wheels and has two free wheels installed under its feet. On flat free ground, this novel system utilizes its motorized and free wheels to travel fast, when facing with some obstacles, the human can turn back to the walking mode. The wearable vehicle has Five degrees of freedom (DOF) per leg; two DOF for the hip joint, one DOF for the knee joint and two DOF for the ankle joint. It has three actuators per leg for motion in the sagittal plane. The mechanical parts of the system are designed using carbon steel (AISI 1020). The proposed design is examined under the maximum loads by using Solidworks 2014 software to check its feasibility in different modes of motion.