The Sarcos SenSuit simultaneously measures 35 degrees of freedom (DOF) of the human body. It can be used for real-time capturing of full body motion, as an advanced human-computer interface (HCI), or to control sophisticated robotic equipment.

Attach:sensuit1_small.jpg Δ The complete SenSuit is worn like an exoskeleton which, for most movements, does not restrict the motion while an array of lightweight Hall-sensors reliably records the relative positions of all limbs. For the arms, we collect shoulder, elbow and wrist DOF, for the legs, hip, knee and ankle data is recorded. In addition, the Sensuit measures head as well as waist motion.

Our experimental setup for the SenSuit consists of a serial connection to a computer to capture the data at a frame rate of up to 100Hz. A platform independent OpenGL graphical display can be used to simultaneously show the captured motion in real-time as well as to generate and to play back animated sequences of stored data files (see animated GIF image below).

Our primary interest is to study human motor-control, e.g. to analyze the unique data from the SenSuit in respect to certain task-related movements. One key question we seek to answer in this context is how the human motor cortex efficiently analyzes, learns, and recalls an apparently infinite number of complex movement patterns while being limited to a finite number of neurons and synapses. These preliminary studies will help to develop new concepts for controlling humanoid robotic systems with many degrees of freedom, one goal which has not yet been achieved by artificial neural network algorithms.