Optimization based analysis of push recovery during walking motions to support the design of lower-limb exoskeletons

Moving independently is very important for most of the people in daily life. Exoskeletons can help disabled people to gain this capability again. Designing these assistive technologies, it is important to take into account that unperturbed motions barely exist. Therefore it is crucial to develop devices that are able to capture from perturbations. To this end in this work the torques needed in a lower body exoskeleton to perform perturbed human walking motions are determined by an optimization based simulation approach. We compare the behavior of a two dimensional human model with and without an exoskeleton. Two different exoskeleton configurations are considered. The differences between perturbed and unperturbed walking motions as well as between the model with and without exoskeleton are analyzed.

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