The design of a prototype system that measures the joint angles of the rotary joint of a robotic exoskeleton is presented in this work. An incremental rotary encoder is a sensor that can be connected to any rotary joint to measure the angle of rotation, speed of rotation, direction of rotation (clockwise or counter-clockwise motion) as well as the acceleration of a joint. The measurement system using a rotary encoder which generates an electrical signal either analog or digital according to the rotation movement was designed in this work. A prototype rotary joint having a 270° range of motion was fabricated with ABS plastic using 3D printing and then connected to an incremental rotary encoder to measure its speed and angle of motion. A robotic exoskeleton was then proposed to be used with the tested and developed measurement system.

The aim of this paper is the presentation and verification of computer vision algorithms in order to measure the geometric parameters of soft robots. The materials from which soft robots are made from possess large deformations. Embedded sensors or visual processing algorithms are often used to obtain measurement performance data from these robots. Integration of embedded sensors with soft robots can be cumbersome and expensive, also limiting the performance of a soft actuator. In this paper, implemented visual processing algorithms (thresholding, SAD, SSD and ZNCC) to measure performance data such as angle of motion, degree of bending, radius of curvature in real-time implemented with OpenCV libraries and Webcam is described. Soft RGB colour markers were also produced and firmly glued into the body of the soft robot with no hindrance to movement. Some concepts of visual processing applied include colour tracking, template matching and camera calibration. The execution of vision based motion control to a variety of soft actuators such as bending and wedge-shaped soft actuators was described.

The development and testing of a rotary soft actuator for gesture-based control is described in this paper. The rotary soft actuators are fabricated via a moulding process and connected to a rotary joint as an antagonist and agonist pair which gives rise to clockwise and counter-clockwise rotation of the joint. The soft robotic system is controlled using the leap motion controller which is a gesture-based device. Gesture commands executed are circle, swipe, screen tap and key tap gestures to produce clockwise, counter-clockwise, stop and start movements of the rotary actuator.