Combined manual control and automatic standing stabilization for wearable leg support system

Abstract

Recently, wearable leg support systems that can be applied to people with lower limb disabilities have been developed by many researchers. This study aims to develop system that automatically prevents a user’s fall due to a sudden disturbance and manipulates a posture based on the user’s intention. To achieve the goal, automatic control was added to the manually controlled leg support system. In the system, the posture of the leg support robot is controlled on a master-slave mode by a control lever attached to the user’s hand. A grip in the lever is automatically controlled to stabilize the standing posture. Experiments using test equipment were performed; results showed that the system automatically prevents the user from falling on the manually controlled system.

Keywords

• manual control
• automatic standing stabilization
• zero moment point