Slope Gradient Adaptive Gait Planning for Walking Assistance Lower Limb Exoskeletons

In recent years, lower limb exoskeletons have gained considerable interest in applications of walking assistance for paraplegic patients. In daily lives, the exoskeleton should have the ability to help the patients to walk over different terrains. For sloped terrains, how to plan the stepping locations on slopes with different gradients and generate stable human-like gaits for patients is a critical issue. In this article, we proposed a slope gradient estimator (SGE) based on the sensor data fusion of the exoskeleton and combined SGE with the capture point theory and dynamic movement primitives (DMP) to construct an adaptive gait planning approach for slopes. After learning from demonstrated gaits sampled from healthy subjects, adaptive gait trajectories can be reproduced online to adapt to slopes with different gradients. The efficiency of the proposed approach was demonstrated on an exoskeleton system named AIDER. Experimental results indicate that the proposed approach can endow exoskeletons with the ability to generate appropriate gaits for different slopes. Note to Practitioners -For lower limb exoskeletons, it is a vital problem to plan the gait for sloped terrains. Considering different gradients among slopes, fixed predefined gait planning cannot cover all cases; thus, a slope gradient adaptive gait planning approach is necessary. The slope gradient estimator proposed in this article provides a possible slope gradient estimation method for exoskeletons or humanoid bipedal robots; it is easy to estimate the slope gradient only based on the local sensor data of the robot. The proposed dynamic gait generator provides lower limb exoskeletons and humanoid bipedal robots a possible adaptive gait planning framework and some flexibility for different slopes. The proposed approach may inspire more extended gait planning strategies for other terrains, such as stairs.