Human balance control in 3D running based on virtual pivot point concept.

Balance control is one of the crucial challenges in bipedal locomotion. Humans need to maintain their trunk upright while the body behaves like an inverted pendulum which is inherently unstable. As an alternative, the virtual pivot point (VPP) concept introduced a new virtual pendulum model to the human balance control paradigm by analyzing the ground reaction forces (GRFs) in the body coordinate frame. This paper presents novel VPP-based analyses of the postural stability of human running in 3D space. We demonstrate the relationship between the VPP position and the gait speed. The experimental results suggest different control strategies in frontal and sagittal planes. The GRFs intersect below the center of mass in the sagittal plane and above the center of mass in the frontal plane. These VPP locations are found for the sagittal and frontal planes at all running speeds. We introduced a 3D VPP-based model which can replicate the kinematic and kinetic behavior of human running. The similarity between the experimental and simulation results indicates the ability of the VPP concept to predict human balance control in running and support its applicability for gait assistance.

From a biological template model to gait assistance with an exosuit.

The invention of soft wearable assistive devices, known as exosuits, introduced a new aspect in assisting unimpaired subjects. In this study, we designed and developed an exosuit with compliant biarticular thigh actuators called BATEX. Unlike the conventional method of using rigid actuators in exosuits, the BATEX is made of serial elastic actuators (SEA) resembling artificial muscles. This bioinspired design is complemented by the novel control concept of using the ground reaction force to adjust the artificial muscles' stiffness in the stance phase. By locking the motors in the swing phase, the SEAs will be simplified to passive biarticular springs, which is sufficient for leg swinging. The key concept in our design and control approach is to synthesize human locomotion to develop an assistive device instead of copying human motor control outputs. Analyzing human walking assistance using experiment-based OpenSim simulations demonstrates the advantages of the proposed design and control of BATEX, such as 9.4% reduction in metabolic cost during normal walking condition. This metabolic reduction increases to 10.4% when the subjects carry a 38 kg load. The adaptability of our proposed model-based control to such an unknown condition outperforms the assistance level of the model-free optimal controller. Moreover, increasing the assistive system's efficiency by adjusting the actuator compliance with the force feedback supports our previous findings on the LOPES II exoskeleton.