Related papers: Personal Mobility With Synchronous Trunk-Knee Pass…
In this paper, we investigate whether applying ankle torques during mid-stance can be a more effective way to reduce energetic cost of locomotion than actuating leg length alone. Ankles are useful in human gaits for many reasons including…
Developing exoskeletons that can reduce the metabolic cost of assisted subjects is challenging since a systematic design approach is required to capture the effects of device dynamics and the assistance torques on human performance. Design…
We present a locomotion mechanism that uses the stick-slip transition of a soft passive structure with an internal mechanical resonance. The structure is harmonically driven by a global vertical shaking and, because of its resonance…
Natural interaction between multiple users within a shared virtual environment (VE) relies on each other's awareness of the current position of the interaction partners. This, however, cannot be warranted when users employ noncontinuous…
In legged locomotion, the relationship between different gait behaviors and energy consumption must consider the full-body dynamics and the robot control as a whole, which cannot be captured by simple models. This work studies the robot…
Reduced shoulder mobility limits upper-limb function and the performance of activities of daily living across a wide range of conditions. Wearable exosuits have shown promise in assisting arm elevation, reducing muscle effort, and…
Impedance-based control represents a prevalent strategy in the powered trans femoral prostheses because of its ability to reproduce natural walking. However, most existing studies have developed impedance-based prosthesis controllers for…
Robot-to-human handovers often rely on static, open-loop strategies (or, at best, approaches that adapt only the position), which generally do not consider how the object will be grasped by the human, thus requiring the user to adapt. This…
3D human motion prediction is a research area of high significance and a challenge in computer vision. It is useful for the design of many applications including robotics and autonomous driving. Traditionally, autogregressive models have…
Falls during daily ambulation activities are a leading cause of injury in older adults due to delayed physiological responses to disturbances of balance. Lower-limb exoskeletons have the potential to mitigate fall incidents by detecting and…
The present study investigated the effect of a passive lower-limb exoskeleton on lumbar load and verified the effectiveness of biomechanical analysis for evaluating the physical burden while wearing the exoskeleton. Twelve healthy male…
Seated VR locomotion in constrained environments, including homes, offices, and transit settings, calls for hardware that is lightweight and deployable, steering that remains continuous enough for curved motion, and a control channel that…
Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (NMPC) is a precise controller, but its heavy computational load often prevents application in robotic systems. Some studies have attempted to approximate NMPC using deep neural networks (NMPC-DNN).…
Preserving and encouraging mobility in the elderly and adults with chronic conditions is of paramount importance. However, existing walking aids are either inadequate to provide sufficient support to users' stability or too bulky and poorly…
We present the first fully automated Sit-to-Stand or Stand-to-Sit (StS) analysis framework for long-term monitoring of patients in free-living environments using video silhouettes. Our method adopts a coarse-to-fine time localisation…
Nonsurgical treatment of Dropped Head Syndrome (DHS) incurs the use of collar-type orthoses that immobilize the neck and cause discomfort and sores under the chin. Articulated orthoses have the potential to support the head posture while…
Springs are commonly used in wearable robotic devices to provide assistive joint torque without the need for motors and batteries. However, different tasks (such as walking or running) and different users (such as athletes with strong legs…
A spring in parallel with an effort source (e.g., electric motor or human muscle) can reduce its energy consumption and effort (i.e., torque or force) depending on the spring stiffness, spring preload, and actuation task. However, selecting…
This work presents a wearable human activity recognition (HAR) system that performs real-time inference directly inside a shank-mounted inertial measurement unit (IMU) to support low-latency control of a lower-limb exoskeleton. Unlike…
State of the art controllers for back exoskeletons largely rely on body kinematics. This results in control strategies which cannot provide adaptive support under unknown external loads. We developed a neuromechanical model-based controller…