Development of gait-training orthosis with water hydraulic Mckibben muscles

Abstract

This paper concerns with development of gait-training orthosis. In particular, in-home and underwater gait-training are focused on, in order to reduce weight and some mechanism of a gait-training orthosis. The proposed orthosis consists of McKibben muscles driven by tap water and harnesses worn on human's body. It means the orthosis has high environmental friendliness and then the orthosis can easily be put on and removed. In addition, the orthosis has enough flexibility for gait-training. In this paper, experiments of hip-joint angle control of the orthosis are conducted and their control performances are shown. Specifically, On/Off control with a concept of model predictive control are compared. Moreover, a muscle model with Bouc-Wen hysteretic model is constructed in order to improve the control performance.