Design and Performance Evaluation of a Wearable Sensing System for Lower-Limb Exoskeleton

Abstract

Because the target users of the assistive-type lower extremity exoskeletons (ASLEEs) are those who suffer from lower limb disabilities, customized gait is adopted for the control of ASLEEs. However, the customized gait is unable to provide stable motion for variable terrain, for example, flat, uphill, downhill, and soft ground. The purpose of this paper is to realize gait detection and environment feature recognition for AIDER by developing a novel wearable sensing system. The wearable sensing system employs 7 force sensors as a sensing matrix to achieve high accuracy of ground reaction force detection. There is one more IMU sensor that is integrated into the structure to detect the angular velocity. By fusing force and angular velocity data, four typical terrain features can be recognized successfully, and the recognition rate can reach up to 93%.