An active compliant knee joint for gait assistance: Design and characterization

Abstract

Wearable lower-limb powered othoses represent valid tools for assisting people affected by gait disorders given their capability to actively sharing the workload of energetically expensive tasks of activities of daily living, contrarily to passive lower-limb orthoses or braces. In this abstract we present the design of an active knee orthotic joint, endowed with a novel series elastic actuator, and the experimental characterization of its torque controller. Experimental results demonstrated that the performance of the active knee joint are suitable for assisting locomotion-related activities of mildly impaired people.