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Optimisation of Reference Gait Trajectory of a Lower Limb Exoskeleton

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Abstract

Lower limb exoskeletons have gained considerable interest in recent years as a research topic for creating aids for people with walking disabilities and strength augmenters for pilot walkers. A crucial practical problem, however, is generating the reference trajectory of the joints. In this paper, we solve the reference trajectory problem by a novel approach which obtains the angle trajectories of knee joints from the hip joints. The relationship between the angle trajectories of the knee and hip joints is acquired through kinematic models of the lower limb exoskeleton. In these models, the parameters of the joint position trajectories are optimised by a swarm fish algorithm with variable population. The proposed approach is validated in virtual simulations and a physical prototype of an exoskeleton system. The experimental results confirm that the reference trajectory generation approach accurately reproduces human walking.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like acknowledge the support provided by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 61273256, No. 71201017, No. 6150020696), Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (ZYGX 2013J088 and ZYGX 2014Z009). Moreover, the authors would like to greatly acknowledge the contribution of the reviewers’ comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Robotics, School of Automation Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, 611731, China

    Rui Huang, Hong Cheng, Yi Chen, Qiming Chen, Xichuan Lin & Jing Qiu

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  1. Rui Huang
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  2. Hong Cheng
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  3. Yi Chen
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  4. Qiming Chen
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Correspondence to Hong Cheng.

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Huang, R., Cheng, H., Chen, Y. et al. Optimisation of Reference Gait Trajectory of a Lower Limb Exoskeleton. Int J of Soc Robotics 8, 223–235 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-015-0334-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-015-0334-7

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