Improving Balance and Energetics of Walking Using a Hip Exoskeleton

The bilateral hip exoskeleton has two degrees of freedom to enable the hip joint extension and flexion movement on both left and right sides. The zero impedance mode will not provide any assistance or resistance to the hip joints.

The personalized optimal assistance mode includes both individualized hip flexion and hip extension assistance, which is determined by using the reinforcement learning-based automatic control parameters tuning during walking tasks. Therefore, the personalized optimal assistance will be able to improve the walking gait performance and reduce the energetic consumption.

The free walking mode will not include the usage of the wearable bilateral hip exoskeleton, and the human walking subjects will conduct pure natural walking tasks.