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Published May 2018 | Accepted Version
Book Section - Chapter Open

Towards Restoring Locomotion for Paraplegics: Realizing Dynamically Stable Walking on Exoskeletons

Abstract

This paper presents the first experimental results of crutch-less dynamic walking with paraplegics on a lower-body exoskeleton: ATALANTE, designed by the French start-up company Wandercraft. The methodology used to achieve these results is based on the partial hybrid zero dynamics (PHZD) framework for formally generating stable walking gaits. A direct collocation optimization formulation is used to provide fast and efficient generation of gaits tailored to each patient. These gaits are then implemented on the exoskeleton for three paraplegics. The end result is dynamically stable walking in an exoskeleton without the need for crutches. After a short period of tuning by the engineers and practice by the subjects, each subject was able to dynamically walk across a room of about 10 m up to a speed of 0.15 m/s (0.5 km/h) without the need for crutches or any other kind of assistance.

Additional Information

© 2018 IEEE. This work has been conducted under IRB No. 16-0693. Their work was supported by NSF NRI award 1526519. The work of A. Hereid was supported by NSF under Grant CPS-1239037. The work of J. W. Grizzle was partially supported by a gift from Ford Motor Company. The authors would like to thank the entire Wandercraft team which designed ATALANTE, implemented and tested the control algorithms both in simulation and in real conditions. Additionally, the authors are grateful to Laurent Praly and Nicolas Petit, researchers at CAS (Mines ParisTech, PSL Research University) for their precious scientific support since the beginning of Wandercraft, and to Koushil Sreenath at UC Berkeley for collaborative efforts on realizing dynamic walking on exoskeletons.

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August 19, 2023
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