Real time gait planning for a mobile medical exoskeleton with crutche

Abstract

An exoskeleton with actuators at the hip and knee joints has been developed for spinal cord injury patients. And a pair of crutches is utilized to help paraplegic patients maintain balance during walking. A real time gait planning strategy has been implemented to allow the users to walk stable and natural. This strategy models the human-machine coupling system as a quadruped robot, adjusts and corrects gait before each step according to real time responses of multiple sensors. Taking into account the kinematic model of people wielding crutches, this gait planning strategy provides a larger stability margin for the system. Finally, experiments are performed on the SIAT exoskeleton in order to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.