Single Support Phase Gait Kinematics and Kinetics for a Humanoid Lower Limb Exoskeleton

Abstract

The field of assistive robotics has gained increasing importance among robotics and mechatronics researchers in recent years. The use of exoskeleton devices has become popular due to an increase in the number of aged as well as physically weak or injured people and stroke patients. The present work has been initiated, keeping in mind all the challenges faced by them. A 10 Degree of Freedom (DoF) lower-limb exoskeleton device has been considered as the most suitable configuration for an assistive robotic device. At first, a simple 3 DoF two-dimensional bipedal manipulator kinematic and dynamic equations have been derived. This knowledge has been utilized to develop the kinematic model for the Single Support Phase (SSP) of the main exoskeleton system, by dividing it into four parts for ease of tracking the manipulator in real-time, as well as to increase the speed of inverse kinematic calculation. It is essential for a hyper-redundant manipulator. The equations have been validated then with the help of standard software tools (MATLAB Simscape). Finally, human gait biomechanics have been compared with the exoskeleton kinematics and kinetics to validate the simulated observations against analytical values.