Systematic Testing of Exoskeletons with Robots: Challenges and Opportunities

Due to the change of industrial processes and demographic shift in many countries, an increase in the use and application of exoskeletons is expected. However, design, development and deployment of exoskeletons requires testing. The standard way of testing novel interactive technologies by user studies suffers from a number of limitations, namely low repeatability between and within subjects, high resource demands, and technical and logistical issues. In this paper, we therefore promote the idea to use robots for more systematic and effective testing of exoskeletons. We suggest a threefold methodology that (i) employs models and simulation to investigate essential mechanisms of the human’s or the robot’s interaction with the exoskeleton, (ii) relies on capturing human motion and using machine learning to model it, and (iii) develops a dedicated platform to deploy the learned human-like motion models on the testing robot. In particular, we argue for a robot design that is specifically tailored to this testing task and can exhibit human-like motion. In this paper we discuss our methodology and its steps towards design and development of such a dedicated test platform.