Balance control for an underactuated leg exoskeleton based on capture point concept and human balance strategies

C. Bidard (1) , Christine Chevallereau (2) , Vaiyee Huynh (3)

1 LRI - Laboratoire de Robotique Interactive
2 IRCCyN - Institut de Recherche en Communications et en Cybernétique de Nantes
3 LRI - Laboratoire de Recherche en Informatique

This paper presents a balance control for a powered lower limbs exoskeleton based on the instantaneous capture point concept and human balance strategies. Our goal is to implement it on the exoskeleton EMY-Balance (CEA-LIST). The control is inspired from biomechanic studies and aims at assisting a healthy person while preserving his comfort and his safety to the maximum. We first present briefly how the machine can balance itself according to external perturbations which can come from the user, and how it can imitate human balance strategies. Then, we present how we compute joint torques for the specific actuation of EMY-Balance. We suppose in this study, that the user and the exoskleton share the same control : 1) the proposed control assists stand leg(s) in order to facilitate the balance recovery, 2) the user is supposed to compensate efforts to overcome actuation issues.

Mots clés: Balance control; Balance recoveries; Motion planning; Anthropomorphic robots; External perturbations; Healthy persons; Human balance; Joint torques; Leg exoskeleton; Underactuated; Exoskeleton (Robotics)

Domaines: Sciences de l'ingénieur [physics]

C. Bidard, Christine Chevallereau, Vaiyee Huynh. Balance control for an underactuated leg exoskeleton based on capture point concept and human balance strategies. 2016 IEEE-RAS 16th International Conference on Humanoid Robots (Humanoids), Nov 2016, Cancun, Mexico. pp.483-488, ⟨10.1109/HUMANOIDS.2016.7803319⟩. ⟨cea-01840419⟩