A Unified Gait Phase Estimation and Control of Exoskeleton using Virtual Energy Regulator (VER)

Virtual Energy Regulator (VER) is a time independent controller that can generate stable limit cycles in lower-limb exoskeleton devices. In this work, we apply VER to control a lower-limb exoskeleton for assistive walking. We design two different limit cycles for hip and knee joints to assist the user during overground walking with the Indego explorer lower-limb exoskeleton. We tested the designed VER on a single participant for overground walking at a self-selected speed. Interestingly, due to VER time-independent nature, it can properly coordinate with the user’s motions and produce mechanically stable overground walking in which the user can walk overground without a walker or crutches. The resultant gait is also more similar to a normal gait with improved range of motion compared to cases without controller; range of motion improved from $42.9 \pm 4.8{deg}$ and $44.9 \pm 4.9 {deg}$ to $46.6 \pm 1.3 {deg}$ and $63.0 \pm 6.8 {deg}$ at hip and knee joints, respectively. Especially, for the knee joint, the user is able to fully extend her knee during stance phase only when the VER is in the loop. In VER, the radius of each desired limit cycle is a function of phase. Accordingly, during walking, the internal phase of the VER is a monotonically increasing parameter that can be considered as a candidate for real-time gait phase estimation and heel-strike event detection. Hence, for gait phase estimation, VER relies only on a single joint position provided by the exoskeleton.