Development of a Soft Exosuit System for Walking Assistance During Stair Ascent and Descent
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ISSN:1598-6446 eISSN:2005-4092 http://www.springer.com/12555
Development of a Soft Exosuit System for Walking Assistance During Stair Ascent and Descent Hee Don Lee*, Heejin Park, Bak Seongho, and Tae Hun Kang* Abstract: An exosuit is a wearable robot that supports human muscular strength from outside the human body through multiple actuators. These actuators, which have similar functions to human muscles, reduce the weight compared to existing exoskeletons and minimize awareness of the different degrees of freedom. In this study, we developed an exosuit system that assists stair ascent and descent by supporting the power of the knee joint. To develop the hardware, we designed the entire system including functional apparel and a wire-driven actuator module. To provide the exosuit wearer with walking assistance, we established control strategies based on gait analysis and a force controller by applying the admittance control method. Then, to verify the usability of this system, we conducted an experiment comparing the muscle activity of users with and without the exosuit. The results revealed that the overall muscle activity of users decreased when they wore the proposed exosuit system. Specifically, the system reduced the muscle activity of the rectus femoris by up to 47% and 31% during stair ascent and descent, respectively. Therefore, the proposed exosuit system provides effective walking assistance. Keywords: Exosuit, exosuit control, exosuit design, power assistive robot, walking assistance robot, wearable robot.
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INTRODUCTION
Wearable robot systems enhance human muscle power in various situations while enabling the human operator to control the position, contextual perception, and motion signal generation through the robot’s artificial intelligence [1]. Wearable robots can be largely classified by mechanism into exoskeletons and exosuits. Existing exoskeletons include various types of robot mechanism combined with the human body [2] and are most effective for supporting the wearer’s weight or helping the wearer move heavy objects that exceed their human capacity. However, when wearing an exoskeleton, the wearer is aware of the lower degrees of freedom (DOF) compared to the rotational axis of human joints; thus, the mass and inertia of the mechanism can affect the balance of the wearer during walking [3, 4]. Consequently, exosuits have been developed to reduce this sense of difference. For example, Asbeck et al. [3] designed and evaluated a multi-articular soft exosuit that is portable, fully autonomous, and provides assistive torque to the wearer at
the ankle and hip during walking. A key feature of this exosuit is that it generates forces passively due to the body’s motion, in a similar manner to the body’s own ligaments and tendons. These passively generated forces can be supplemented by actively contracting Bowden cables [3]. Schmidt et al. [4] developed the Muosuit; a soft, wearable device designed to provide continuous assistance at the hip and knee joints when working with and against gravity duri
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