Soft-Actuated Exosuit

My senior capstone team was tasked with designing a soft-actuated exosuit that could help prevent lifting-induced back injuries. While this was left relatively open-ended, given the budget and time frame we decided to use pneumatic balloon actuators known as McKibben muscles. These were grouped into two banks: four along the longissimus muscles on the back, and four around the abdominal area to provide support.

The system is controlled by an Arduino, which takes input from and IMU to determine the start and end of a lift. The Arduino also reads pressure sensors to control the valves connected to the actuators. The air and power supplies are external.

I was tasked with:

Designing and building the McKibben pneumatic muscles
Overall design and construction
Drawings and schematics

While we were not able to finish the prototype due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we finished designing and modeling the suit online and in CAD.