Modeling and Simulation of Human Walking With Wearable Powered Assisting Device

Abstract

For the purpose of developing robot-assisted human walking systems, human and robot walking dynamics are modeled using models of different complexity depending on simulation scenarios in different phases of robotic system development and selected walking parameters to be analyzed. This paper addresses the early modeling and simulation phase of the development of a novel mobile robot-assisted gait rehabilitation system to be used as a demonstrator for a cognitive robot control architecture currently under development. For simulation purposes dynamical models of walking human and powered orthosis are developed in multi-body simulation software (MSC Adams) using the LifeMod plug-in while the control algorithms are developed in Matlab. The paper introduces a novel ROS (Robot Operating System) based communication established between the real system software modules and the simulation environment. The performance evaluation was performed by running the simulation with motion data which were obtained using marker-based motion capture system and which were implemented as ROS node.