Development of Adjustable Knee Assist Device for Wearable Robot based on Linkage and Rolling Joint

This paper presents an adjustable knee joint for a wearable robot for the elderly, to provide physical gait assistance. In order to compensate for the translational and rotational movements of the knee in the sagittal plane as well as aligning the frontal plane, the proposed knee joint is implemented with a rolling joint, two aligning passive joints, four-bar linkage, and a sliding mechanism. Because the sliding mechanism, four-bar linkage, and rolling joint exist between the actuator and the joint mechanism, the rotation angle of the actuator and the flexion angle of the rolling joint do not change equally due to the kinematic characteristics. In order to define the flexion angle change of the rolling joint with respect to the change to the actuator angle in the flexion/extension motion of knee, the design parameters and flexion model are proposed in this paper. The proposed artificial knee joint effectively delivers the torque required for assistance while adapting to the joint motion of the wearer. This paper describes the mechanical design of this knee mechanism and its implementation on a wearable robot and in preliminary experiments. The performance of the proposed mechanism was verified by simulations and experiments. Finally, preliminary experiments were performed to demonstrate the possibility of reducing the metabolic cost of using a knee assist.