Control of Foot Trajectory in Biped Robots

Abstract

Exoskeletons with pre-programmed gait patterns, though a great help to spinal cord injured patients with paraplegia, exhibit a limitation in their inability to carry out user-intended foot movements. This project aims to overcome this limitation by building an interface to allow the user to control the trajectory of the robotic feet in real time. The interface consists of index and middle fingers simulating foot movements that are translated into movements of the feet of the biped robots in the sagittal plane. The finger movements represent the ankle trajectories and are converted to angular trajectories of robotic feet with 2-degrees of freedom using an inverse kinematics model.