Actively controlled lateral gait assistance in a lower limb exoskeleton

Various powered wearable lower limb exoskeletons are designed for paraplegics to make them walk again. Control methods are developed and implemented in these exoskeletons to provide active gait assistance in the sagittal plane while active control in the frontal plane is still missing. This paper proposed a control method that provided gait assistance in both lateral and sagittal plane. First, in the lateral plane, the exoskeleton was controlled to support the weight shift during stepping by providing assisting hip ab/adduction torques when the subject initiated a small amount of weight shift to the stance side to trigger a step. Second, the exoskeleton's hip ab/adduction during stepping was controlled to improve lateral stability. This was achieved by altering the amount of hip ab/adduction to change step width at heel strike. Using these controls, an able-bodied subject could walk in the exoskeleton without any external balance aids, i.e. crutches or a walker, where his hip and knee joints were controlled by the exoskeleton and his ankle joints were constrained by the exoskeleton. The next step is to test whether the proposed method improves balance in spinal cord injured subjects.