An event-driven control to achieve adaptive walking assist with gait primitives

Abstract

This paper presents a control method for walking assist with hip-mounted exoskeleton robots. For modeling a user's current walking motion, a novel finite state machine is first constructed. We divide a walking cycle uniformly using the inevitable zero crossing events. When state transitions occur, we capture the current walking spatio-temporal sensor data as discrete form. By using the sensed hip data as boundary conditions, we also develop a gait primitives based motion reconstruction method. Gait primitives are a form of basis trajectories to represent various joint motions. From those methods we estimate the moment of heel landing with interpolated knee joint motions. Utilizing the user's previous opposite step motion, we predict the positive or negative work intervals of the current step motion. This makes it possible to achieve natural ‘one shot’ assist by driving adapted torques fast. This assist strategy is also effective to enhance gait regularity. The measures of stride time variability are improved by over 30% for the simulated experiment. Various real experimentations demonstrate the feasibility of our approach.