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Shank Shock Absorption Mechanism and Associated Gait Pattern Design for Reduction of Ground Impact of a Powered Exoskeleton

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Abstract

Powered exoskeletons for people with complete paraplegia are subject to repetitive large impacts due to the recurrent ground contacts. Those impact forces not only deteriorate the ride comfort but also cause a serious damage to the musculoskeletal system of the human wearing the powered exoskeleton. To address the issue, a mechanism to absorb shock for powered exoskeletons are proposed in this paper. The proposed shock absorption mechanism was integrated into the WalkON Suit, a powered exoskeleton for complete paraplegics. To obtain the desired performance of the proposed mechanism, the gait pattern of the powered exoskeleton was also designed. The mechanism and gait pattern generation algorithm were verified from experiments with a human subject.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Mechanical Engineering, KAIST, 291, Daehak-ro, Yuseong-gu, Daejeon, Korea

    Jeongsu Park, Daeho Lee & Kyoungchul Kong

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  1. Jeongsu Park
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  2. Daeho Lee
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  3. Kyoungchul Kong
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Kyoungchul Kong.

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Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that there is no competing financial interest or personal relationship that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Jeongsu Park received his B.Eng. degree in mechanical engineering in 2019 and an M.S. degree in mechanical engineering in 2021 from Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), Daejeon, Korea. He has been a member of Team Angel Robotics which won the Gold Medal and Bronze Medal of Cybathlon 2020. He received the KAIST Global Leadership Awards in 2021. His current research interests include hardware design and system control of powered exoskeleton for paraplegics. He is now developing WalkON Suit V, which will make people with paraplegia walk independently and get them out of wheelchairs.

Daeho Lee is a Researcher at the Agency for Defense Development in Daejeon, Korea. He received his B.Eng. degree (magna cum laude) in mechanical engineering with a minor in business and technology management in 2020, and an M.S. degree in mechanical engineering in 2022 from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), Daejeon, Korea. He has been a member of Team Angel Robotics which won the Gold Medal and Bronze Medal of Cybathlon 2020. He received the KAIST Global Leadership Awards in 2021. His current research interests include design and control of human-assistive robots, modeling of human-body dynamics, and sensor technology related to human-intention recognition.

Kyoungchul Kong received his B.Eng. degree (summa cum laude) in mechanical engineering, a B.S. degree in physics in 2004, an M.S. degree in mechanical engineering in 2006 from Sogang University, Seoul, Korea, and a Ph.D. degree in mechanical engineering from the University of California at Berkeley, CA, USA, in 2009, where he later became a Postdoctoral Research Fellow until 2011. In 2011, he joined the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Sogang University, as an assistant professor. He is currently an associate professor of the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST). He is a founder and the CEO of Angel Robotics, a start-up company for productizing wearable robots. Dr. Kong received the Best Innovation Award from the President of Korea in 2017, the Commendation by the Minister of Commerce, Industry and Energy in 2017, the Bronze Medal of Cybathlon 2016, the Young Researcher Award of IFAC Mechatronics TC in 2016, the Gold Medal and Bronze Medal of Cybathlon 2020, and many others.

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This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant funded by the Korea government (MSIT) (2022R1A3B1077880).

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Park, J., Lee, D. & Kong, K. Shank Shock Absorption Mechanism and Associated Gait Pattern Design for Reduction of Ground Impact of a Powered Exoskeleton. Int. J. Control Autom. Syst. 21, 1959–1969 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12555-022-0905-y

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