Gait control of humans with assistive devices

R. Antonova, S. Karastanev, P. Kiriazov

Abstract: Gait control is a complex process which has an intrinsic focus on planning, execution and adaptation of the whole-body movement by the CNS. An underlying assumption in our work is that the motion of healthy people is optimal with respect to speed, positioning accuracy, and energy expenditure. Motor control may become much more complicated for people having stroke, traumas or neurological diseases. Patients need to restore their motor control functions and motion performance to the best possible level. Various assistive devices may be used for restoration of human movement abilities: crutches, prostheses, passive and active orthoses, robotic exoskeletons, etc. To meet the above challenges, it is very important how to properly decompose complex modelling, identification and optimisation tasks into sets of much easier-to-find satisfactory solutions. It is of primary importance to properly identify the structure of the walking dynamics for every locomotion phase and the corresponding control functions.
At first, a set of variables (controlled outputs) that best characterize human dynamic performance in the locomotion task has to be defined. Second, we have to find those driving forces/torques that mostly contribute to the dynamic performance in this task.

Keywords: control learning; dynamics; performance optimisation

Date published: 2015-06-09