Lower limb wearable robots for physiological gait restoration: state of the art and motivations

Wearable robots are a class of mechatronic systems intended to exchange energy with the environment and the human body in order to attain performance augmentation as well as for assistive, prosthetic or rehabilitative purposes. In this scenario a safe physical human-robot interaction assumes a crucial role both from hardware and software points of view. Whereas the conventional design methodology is effective in several robotics fields, issues arise in the case of wearable robots. The goal of the authors is to develop a novel wearable robots design methodology exploiting the concept of embodied intelligence. The paper starts from the description of what is a wearable robot and what are the design objectives to achieve. Then a state of the art of lower limbs wearable robots is reported. The adoption of a novel design methodology based on embodied intelligence is finally described and motivated. In conclusion, an example of the application of these new methods to a nonanthropomorphic wearable robot for gait restoration is reported.

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