This chapter presents a medical robot exoskeleton developed to assist spinal cord injury patients to walk independently, focusing on real-time gait planning. The exoskeleton robot is built with actuators at the hip and knee joints, and a pair of crutches to help paraplegic patients maintain balance during walking. A real-time gait planning strategy is developed to allow the users to walk stably in a natural manner. This gait planning treats the human-machine coupling system as a quadruped robot and adjusts and corrects gait before each step according to real-time responses of multiple sensors. Taking into account of the kinematic model of people wielding crutches, this gait planning strategy provides a larger stability margin for the system. Results of experiments are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed gait planning method.
Real-time gait planning for a lower limb exoskeleton robot, Page 1 of 2
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