학술논문

Step length adaptation for walking assistance
Document Type
Conference
Source
2017 IEEE International Conference on Mechatronics and Automation (ICMA) Mechatronics and Automation (ICMA), 2017 IEEE International Conference on. :644-650 Aug, 2017
Subject
Bioengineering
Robotics and Control Systems
Signal Processing and Analysis
Exoskeletons
Legged locomotion
Adaptation models
Trajectory
Learning (artificial intelligence)
Dynamics
Mathematical model
Step Length Adaptation
Walking Assistance
Dynamic Movement Primitives
Reinforcement Learning
AIDER
Language
ISSN
2152-744X
Abstract
Lower exoskeleton has gained considerable interests in rehabilitation and health care applications, since it has the potential to help the paraplegia patients to walk again. On the control of these lower exoskeletons, the predefined gait control methods are commonly used, which requires the pilot to adjust his/her movements to follow the predefined motion trajectories. In the meanwhile, the desired trajectories are predefined from healthy persons or extrapolated from clinical gait analysis (CGA) datasets. However, in individual walking assistance situations, the exoskeleton should have the ability to adapt with variant motions of the pilot, since the pilot will change his motion in different walking situations. This paper presents a novel step length adaptation method to adapt the pilot's motion for walking assistance exoskeletons. In this paper, the exoskeleton robot is model as a special Hybrid Human-Exoskeleton Agent (HHEA), which considers both the exoskeleton and the pilot. The Dynamic Movement Primitives (DMP) is utilized to model the exoskeleton gait trajectories dynamically, in which the relationship between the gait length and Center of Mass (CoM) of HHEA is considered. In the training process, a Reinforcement Learning (RL) method is employed to update the parameters of dynamic gait model online. We demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed step length adaptation method in simulation environment as well as a lower limb exoskeleton system named as AssItive DEvice for paRaplegics (AIDER). Experimental results shows that the proposed step length adaptation method is able to adapt variant motions of the pilot during walking.