Test Benches and Protocols
Luis Adrián Zúñiga Avilés, Giorgio Mackenzie Cruz-Martínez · 2024
Designers use experimental physical models and prototyping to visualize and communicate their design solutions to explore the appearance, composition, ergonomics, and functionality from idea to detail design, as well as to identify design problems and potential solutions within the context of space and user needs. A test bench is an environment used precisely to verify the correctness and reliability of a design. All of them are indispensable tools before a product goes into production. The scheduling of the product development tasks includes critical activities: the assessment of problems in the subsystem’s design, the evaluations of the solution proposals, and the validation of such proposals, which allows the approval of each phase of the design of the exoskeleton. The scientific rigor and the precision of the experimentation results are fundamental in the decisions taken to increase the technological maturity of the exoskeleton design. This chapter focuses on the design of test benches and features, outlining of testing protocols, and experimentation of both subsystems and the entire exoskeleton, considering the laboratory environment to evaluate the experimental physical model and the real environment to assess the prototype.