Gait-event-based synchronization and control of a compact portable knee—ankle—foot exoskeleton robot for gait rehabilitation
This chapter presents the mechanical design and control of a knee-ankle-foot exoskeleton robot, which is compact, modular and portable for stroke patients to carry out overground gait training. A novel compact series elastic actuator (SEA) is developed for safe human-robot interactions. In order to control this portable knee-ankle-foot robot, a novel human-robot synchronization method using gait event information is proposed. This method includes two steps. Firstly, seven gait events in one gait cycle are detected in real time with a hidden Markov model (HMM); secondly, an adaptive oscillator is utilized to estimate the stride percentage of human gait using any one of the gait events. Synchronous reference trajectories for the robot are then generated with the estimated stride percentage. The proposed synchronization method is implemented in the robot and tested in 15 healthy subjects. The results of the experiments reveal that our approach is efficient in achieving human-robot synchronization. It shows that this method has the advantages of simple structure, flexible selection of gait events and fast adaptation.
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