Reviving Mobility: Project MARCH IX Exoskeleton

Eurocircuits and Project MARCH IX

Project MARCH is a student team, a so called Dream Team, of the Technical University Delft. Every year a group of 28 enthusiastic and motivated students put their studies on hold for a year to fully commit themselves to designing, developing and building an exoskeleton. An exoskeleton is a robotic motorized suit that enables someone with a complete spinal cord injury, who is wheelchair-bound, to stand up and walk again. We design this year’s exoskeleton together with our 29^th and most important team member: our pilot Daan van der Heyden. Daan has a complete spinal cord injury and it is his first year working with project MARCH.

CYBATHLON 2024

The vision of Project MARCH is that by pushing the boundaries of exoskeleton technology, we can improve the quality of life for people with a spinal cord injury. We want to accomplish this by building an innovative exoskeleton each year. In the last few years Project MARCH has focused on dynamic walking, which means that the exoskeleton is more adaptable to daily life. The exoskeleton is now able to see its surroundings by the use of cameras, and react to them by stepping on the right spots and giving suggestions to the pilot. Last year, the eighth team focused on balance, and they built an exoskeleton with which the pilot can walk without crutches. This year, our team is focused on combining all of the innovations from previous years into one reliable exoskeleton. And with this exoskeleton, we will participate at the CYBATHLON 2024, one of the biggest bionic competitions in the world.

Battery Switching System

As reliability and performance at the Cybathlon are this year’s goal, the electrical system of the exoskeleton has to be improved. One of the main challenges is reliability. Each year we need a significant amount of training time with our pilot. The pilot has a huge impact on the system. Thus, our pilot has to train a lot with the exoskeleton. In previous years the training time was always somewhat limited as every year there were setbacks that impacted the planning. Replacing, repairing and debugging can take a lot of time. This is why we wanted to cut down on these replacing and repairing times by making the PCBs in the exoskeleton a lot more reliable.

Another major goal for the electrical department was making sure there is enough battery capacity to complete all of the tasks at the Cybathlon. To address this, newly introduced in MARCH IX is the battery switching circuit (BSC). This is a custom-made PCB that allows us to switch between two power sources, in our case the battery and the power supply. This allows us to do all software checks on the power supply, while not having to turn the exoskeleton off or waste power from the battery. It ensures that we start our Cybathlon tasks with a full battery.

MDrive

The MDrives are the custom motor controllers newly designed, produced and used by Project MARCH IX. A motor controller is a device that can control the performance of a motor. Before MARCH VI, project MARCH was using the IMotion Cube. These motor controllers broke easily and were unreliable. After that, we began using the ODrive motor controllers. They also have their fair share of advantages and disadvantages. One of the disadvantages of the ODrives is that they cannot communicate directly with the EtherCAT train, thus MARCH VII and MARCH VIII have been iterating on a custom-made solution, the DieBo. This year, we decided to get rid of the DieBo and design our own motor controller, based on a combination of the ODrive and the DieBo.

Reveal

Since the start of our year, we’ve worked extensively. Our digital design for the new exoskeleton, the MARCH IX is finally ready! Now that the digital design is done, and all the necessary  physical components have been built and integrated into the exoskeleton, we are focusing on training with our pilot. Our Electrical Engineers received valuable help from Eurocircuits in terms of producing our PCBs. Curious to see how it turned out? Join our Reveal on the 22nd of July. You can get your free tickets here: https://eventix.shop/guqj6q47