Development and Adaptive Assistance Control of the Robotic Hip Exoskeleton to Improve Gait Symmetry and Restore Normal Gait

Neurological disorders and aging induce abnormal gait kinematics such as asymmetric gait, reduced stride length, and walking speeds. Gait asymmetry increases musculoskeletal pain and joint impairment in the affected leg, increases the risk of patients falling, and induces higher energy expenditure. This paper presents a novel assistive control framework for the series elastic actuator-driven robotic hip exoskeleton that improves gait symmetry and restores normal gait. The proposed assistive control depends on virtual stiffness compensation with a series elastic actuator (SEA)-driven hip exoskeleton to assist without needing estimation, prediction of the gait phase, or human intent. In addition, adaptive adjustment of the virtual stiffness based on the approximate dynamic programming method is used to improve gait symmetry. The proposed control strategy is successfully implemented, and experiments are validated with human subjects’ gait assistance using a SEA-driven wearable hip exoskeleton. Note to Practitioners—This paper was motivated by the problem of hip exoskeleton assistive control. The goal of hip exoskeleton assistance is to improve gait symmetry and restore the normal gait of the patient with neurological disorders and the elderly. Existing approaches to fixturing such parts generally need to estimate or predict the gait phase or human intent. And the existing approaches generally adopted fixed control parameters. The hip exoskeleton’s assistance cannot adapt to various walking conditions and human gait differences. The proposed assistive control is based on virtual stiffness compensation with a SEA-driven hip exoskeleton to assist with walking under various walking conditions without estimating or predicting the gait phase or human intent. And the proposed method is online adjusted control parameters with human-in-the-loop to improve the gait symmetry. The human walking experiment results showed that the hip exoskeleton assistive controller not only reduced muscle activation and human effort but also improved the interjoint coordination of the impaired joint online. We also showed how the assistance controller changes the control parameters according to the gait symmetry with a human-in-the-loop strategy.