Gait Planning with Dynamic Movement Primitives for Lower Limb Exoskeleton Walking Up Stairs

Abstract

With the capability to enable lower limb paralysis people to stand up and walk again, lower limb exoskeleton has become more and more popular over the world. However, most of the exoskeleton use the pre-defined or pre-planned movement gait which lack of flexibility and adaptability, thus limit the use of exoskeleton in outdoor environments. In this paper, we present a gait planning method with dynamic movement primitives to enable the lower limb exoskeleton walk up stairs smoothly. This approach can adjust the exoskeleton gait trajectory online for walking up stairs by detecting the position of the stair edge at each step. Compared to the previous methods, our method gives the lower limb exoskeleton the following advantages: more natural gait, better dynamic effects and higher autonomy, which may broaden the use of lower limb exoskeleton. Experiment results validate the presented gait planning method.