Title: Dynamic gait planning for walking assistance

Authors: Qiming Chen; Hong Cheng; Chunfeng Yue; Rui Huang

Addresses: Center for Robotics, School of Automation Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, 610000, China ' Center for Robotics, School of Automation Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, 610000, China ' Center for Robotics, School of Automation Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, 610000, China ' Center for Robotics, School of Automation Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, 610000, China

Abstract: On the control of these lower-limb exoskeletons, predefined gait control methods are commonly used. However, for assisting walking the lower limb exoskeletons should adapt with variant motions of pilots, since pilots change their motions in different walking situations. This paper presents a novel dynamic gait planning method to adapt the pilot's motion for walking assistance exoskeletons. In this paper, we model a key gait parameter (step length) of HHEA as a function centre of mass (CoM) and update this parameter of this model with reinforcement learning method online. The dynamic movement primitive method is utilized to model the exoskeleton gait trajectories dynamically. We demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed dynamic gait method in simulation environment as well as a real lower-limb exoskeleton system. Experimental results shows that the proposed dynamic gait method is able to adapt variant motions of the pilot during walking.

Keywords: dynamic gait planning; walking assistance; dynamic movement primitives; reinforcement learning.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMA.2017.093314

International Journal of Mechatronics and Automation, 2017 Vol.6 No.1, pp.36 - 45

Received: 07 Sep 2017
Accepted: 23 Mar 2018
Published online: 24 Jul 2018 *

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