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Learning and planning of stair ascent for lower-limb exoskeleton systems

Qiming Chen (University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, China)
Hong Cheng (School of Automation School, Center for Robotics, Chengdu, China)
Rui Huang (School of Automation Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, China)
Jing Qiu (University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, China)
Xinhua Chen (University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, China)

Industrial Robot

ISSN: 0143-991x

Article publication date: 20 June 2019

Issue publication date: 5 August 2019

242

Abstract

Purpose

Lower-limb exoskeleton systems enable people with spinal cord injury to regain some degree of locomotion ability, as the expected motion curve needs to adapt with changing scenarios, i.e. stair heights, distance to the stairs. The authors’ approach enables exoskeleton systems to adapt to different scenarios in stair ascent task safely.

Design/methodology/approach

In this paper, the authors learn the locomotion from predefined trajectories and walk upstairs by re-planning the trajectories according to external forces posed on exoskeleton systems. Moreover, instead of using complex sensors as inputs for re-planning in real-time, the approach can obtain forces acting on exoskeleton through dynamic model of human-exoskeleton system learned by an online machine learning approach without accurate parameters.

Findings

The proposed approach is validated in both simulation environment and a real walking assistance exoskeleton system. Experimental results prove that the proposed approach achieves better performance than the traditional predefined gait approach.

Originality/value

First, the approach obtain the external forces by a learned dynamic model of human-exoskeleton system, which reduces the cost of exoskeletons and avoids the heavy task of translating sensor input into actuator output. Second, the approach enables exoskeleton accomplish stair ascent task safely in different scenarios.

Keywords

Citation

Chen, Q., Cheng, H., Huang, R., Qiu, J. and Chen, X. (2019), "Learning and planning of stair ascent for lower-limb exoskeleton systems", Industrial Robot, Vol. 46 No. 3, pp. 421-430. https://doi.org/10.1108/IR-03-2018-0054

Publisher

:

Emerald Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2019, Emerald Publishing Limited

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