A human interface for stride control on a wearable robot

A legged locomotor device for paraplegics have been attempted to improve their ADL and to prevent some complications. A stride control of the system based on the user's intension is important to coordinate the voluntary movements of the user and the assisted movements of the paralyzed legs. In this paper, we propose a human interface with a walker to control the stride length of a legged locomotor device. Assuming that a intended stride is equal to a distance of the preceding movement of the walker, we developed a human interface estimating the movement distance of the walker, where the distance is calculated by polynomial fitting for the acceleration of the movement. In this study, we examine the proposed human interface from the measurement experiments of gait movements, and report the following results: (1) estimation accuracy by polynomial fitting method, and (2) feasibility of the adjustment of stride length using the proposed method. These results suggest that the proposed human interface is effective to adjust the stride length of a legged locomotor device.