Saskia Baltrusch

133 Chapter 5 3 Experiments The exoskeleton is tested in two ways: the isolated components, and the interaction of the exoskeleton with the user. The user testing is comprised of two parts, biomechanical and functional testing. 3.1 Component Testing In order to assess the behavior of the individual components of the exoskeleton the carbon fiber beam and the torque source at the hip were benchmarked with respect to their torque angle characteristic. This allows to estimate the torque provided by the exoskeleton with kinematic data. In order to benchmark the components, they were fixed in a custom made test stand (Figure 6A,B). The components were equipped with reflective markers and their position was tracked with a camera system (Vicon Vero) at a frequency of 100 Hz. External forces, recorded with a load cell (Futek LSB 200, 445 N) at 1 kHz, were applied manually to excite the components. The recorded data was processed with custom made MATLAB scrips. The results are reported in section 4.1. 5