Team Members & Role:

• Dominic Locurto
• Aidan Downey
• Alex Klinkhamer
• Sam Naftal
• Simon Houghton

Abstract:

This project will address the need of a variable stiffness and damping treadmill for use in the Human Robot Systems Lab (HRSL) for developing assistive robotic exoskeletons; and the UMass Human Integration Locomotion Lab (UMILL) to assist stroke patients in rehabilitation to get their walking cycle back to normal. Our team was employed to create the device that performs the varying stiffness and damping while having a small footprint. The variable stiffness will be performed through changing the effective length of a cantilever beam. The variable damping will be performed using a magnetorheological fluid damper. Other variable stiffness treadmills fall short of meeting the sponsors’ needs. Namely, they are too large, too complex, and do not contain a variable damping element.

Our design is novel since our method of varying stiffness has not been realized for this use. Our approach will address these needs in the Spring semester by continuing with our design process and performing simulation on the load bearing components. Iteration of this process is currently ongoing to ensure that these parts are up to both our customers’ and engineering standards. The first step next semester will be to create a small-scale prototype for testing to validate our analyses.