This paper describes a powered lower-limb orthosis that is intended to provide gait assistance to spinal cord injured (SCI) individuals by providing assistive torques at both hip and knee joints, along with a user interface and control structure that enables control of the powered orthosis via upper-body influence. The orthosis and control structure was experimentally implemented on a paraplegic subject (T10 complete) in order to provide a preliminary characterization of its capability to provide basic walking. Data and video is presented from these initial trials, which indicates that the orthosis and controller are able to effectively provide walking within parallel bars at an average speed of 0.8 km/hr.

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Body weight supported treadmill training (BWST) has been confirmed that it can improve walking capabilities in spinal cord-injured and stroke patients. During treadmill training, the leg movements of the patients have to be manually assisted by physiotherapists. The physical capabilities and the individual experience of the therapists usually limit this training. A powered gait orthosis (PGO) is being developed that can move the legs of a patient in a physiological way on the moving treadmill. This paper summarizes the design and analysis of the PGO. The anthropomorphically based PGO has two DOF per leg, which are driven by electric linear actuators. The selection of the DOF and critical component design aspects are discussed.

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Scientists and businesses are increasingly using computer vision systems for tasks such as identifying important research results, developing highly functional robots, making video games more realistic, and enabling surveillance cameras to recognize potential security problems. Considerable effort is now under way to add more intelligence to vision systems to make them even more effective.

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The Sogang University biomedical assistive robot (SUBAR), which is an advanced version of the exoskeleton for patients and the old by Songang (EXPOS) is a wearable robot developed to assist physically impaired people. It provides a person with assistive forces controlled by human intentions. If a standard geared DC motor is applied, however, the control efforts will be used mainly to overcome the resistive forces caused by the friction, the damping, and the inertia in actuators. In this paper, such undesired properties are rejected by applying a flexible transmission. With the proposed method, it is intended that an actuator exhibits zero impedance without friction while generating the desired torques precisely. Since the actuation system of SUBAR has a large model variation due to human-robot interaction, a control algorithm for the flexible transmission is designed based on a robust control method. In this paper, the mechanical design of SUBAR, including the flexible transmission and its associated control algorithm, are presented. They are also verified by experiments.

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This paper presents a robot aimed to assist the shoulder movements of stroke patients during their rehabilitation process. This robot has the general form of an exoskeleton, but is characterized by an action principle on the patient no longer requiring a tedious and accurate alignment of the robot and patient’s joints. It is constituted of a poly-articulated structure whose actuation is deported and transmission is ensured by Bowden cables. It manages two of the three rotational degrees of freedom (DOFs) of the shoulder. Quite light and compact, its proximal end can be rigidly fixed to the patient’s back on a rucksack structure. As for its distal end, it is connected to the arm through passive joints and a splint guaranteeing the robot action principle, i.e. exert a force perpendicular to the patient’s arm, whatever its configuration. This paper also presents a first prototype of this robot and some experimental results such as the arm angular excursions reached with the robot in the three joint planes.

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