Paper Info
Title
Underactuated Soft Hip Exosuit Based on Adaptive Oscillators to Assist Human Locomotion
Abstract
Reproducing the mechanisms of human locomotion is a hard challenge. Assistive wearable devices in this context need to be lightweight, portable, and to adapt to the wearer’s walking pattern. Aiming to combine the aforementioned features, we developed a soft wearable exosuit to assist hip flexion during walking. The main feature of the device is underactuation, i.e., a single actuator is used to assist bilateral hip flexion. A control strategy based on Adaptive Oscillators and gait phase estimation is implemented to deliver flexible assistance and to adapt to changes in walking pattern. The system was tested on six healthy subjects. Preliminary results show good performance of the control algorithm to track human gait and to deliver symmetrical assistance to both legs. First kinematic and muscular assessments revealed promising results at walking speeds near to the natural human walking, where the device did not alter hip kinematics and decreased the effort required by muscles contributing to hip flexion. Once validated on a larger sample of subjects, the device can have the potentialities to be used in clinical and wellness applications.
Year
DOI
Venue
2022
10.1109/LRA.2021.3136240
IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Adaptive oscillators,gait phase,modeling,control,and learning for soft robots,wearable robotics,underactuated robots
Journal
7
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
2
2377-3766
2
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.38
0
11
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Enrica Tricomi120.72
Nicola Lotti251.89
Francesco Missiroli351.89
Xiaohui Zhang420.72
Michele Xiloyannis520.38
Thomas Müller620.38
Simona Crea720.38
Emese Papp820.38
Jens Krzywinski920.38
Nicola Vitiello1020.38
Lorenzo Masia1141.51