A novel human effort estimation method for knee assistive exoskeletons

In this work we present a novel method to estimate online the torques at the knee joints with the goal to generate reference signals for knee assistive devices. One of the main advantages of the proposed approach is its reduced sensing requirements, which leads to an ergonomic setup with minimal instrumentation, especially above the knee and of the upper body. Indeed, only the measurement of the forces and torques exchanged between the ground and the user's feet, the posture of the shanks, and the model of the user's shank itself are needed for the estimation of the knee torque. The method does not require information of the state of the upper body and of a possible payload i.e. body pose, mass and center of mass (CoM) location. As a result, a minimalistic sensory system consisting of sensorized shoes and IMUs to track the shanks' orientation are adequate, allowing for an easily wearable and portable setup. The estimation of the knee torques is achieved by imposing an equilibrium condition to the user's shank. Several experiments were performed to test the effectiveness of the proposed estimation method under different body postures and motions (e.g. squat motion and switching foot contacts) and payloads (e.g. by holding weights at different arm postures resulting in variable upper body CoM). Finally an assistive task, conducted with the iT-Knee bipedal system is presented, where the lifted payload changed its CoM location over time.