Author
Uğurlu, Regaip Barkan, Oshima, H., Sariyildiz, E., Narildyo, T., Babic, J.
Publication Date
2020-04
Publication Place
-
IEEE
Subject
Compliance control, locomotion control, lower body exoskeleton
Type
Periodical
Language
English
Digital
Yes
Manuscript
No
Library
Özyeğin University
Library Asset ID
2168-2291
Record ID
b820dee2-4d6f-404d-85ed-77a12f75bc4a
Library Location
Mechanical Engineering
Date
2020-04
Sample Text
This article presents a locomotion controller for lower limb exoskeletons so as to enable the combined robot and user system to exhibit compliant walking characteristics when interacting with the environment. This is of critical importance to reduce the excessive ground reaction forces during the walking task execution with the aim of improved environmental interaction capabilities. In robot-aided walking support for paraplegics, the user has to actively use his/her upper limbs via crutches to ensure overall balance. By virtue of this requisite, several issues may particularly arise during touchdown instants, e.g., upper body orientation fluctuates, shoulder joints are subject to excessive loading, and arms may need to exert extra forces to counterbalance these effects. In order to reduce the upper body effort via compliant locomotion, the controller is designed to manage the force/position tradeoff by using an admittance controller in each joint. For proof of concept, a series of exoskeleton-aided walking experiments were conducted with the participation of nine healthy volunteers, four of whom additionally walked on an irregular surface for further performance evaluation. The results suggest that the proposed locomotion controller is advantageous over conventional high-gain position tracking in decreasing undesired oscillatory torso motion and total arm force, adequately reducing the required upper body effort.
DOI
10.1109/THMS.2019.2961969
Cilt
50
