Disabled people require assistance with the motion of their lower limbs to improve rehabilitation. Exoskeletons used for lower limb rehabilitation are highly priced and are not affordable to the lowerincome sector of the population. This paper describes an exoskeleton lower limb system that was designed keeping in mind that the cost must be as low as possible. ...

Exoskeletons have been used for human performance restoration and enhancement for many years. Due to the dynamic nature of human locomotion, torque control is widely used in lower-limb exoskeleton assistance during stance phases of walking. In these systems, series-elastic actuators (SEA) are commonly used to provide low error torque tracking in the presence of unknown and changing human dynami...

This article presents the state of the art in passive devices for enhancing limb movement in people with neuromuscular disabilities. Both upper- and lower-limb projects and devices are described. Special emphasis is placed on a passive functional upper-limb orthosis called the Wilmington Robotic Exoskeleton (WREX). The development and testing of the WREX with children with limited arm strength ...

Many of the current implementations of exoskeletons for the lower extremities are conceived to either augment the user’s load-carrying capabilities or reduce muscle activation during walking. Comparatively little research has been conducted on enabling an exoskeleton to increase the agility of lower-limb movements. One obstacle in this regard is the inertia of the exoskeleton’s mechanism, which...

The design of a wearable robotic exoskeleton needs to consider the interaction, either physical or cognitive, between the human user and the robotic device. This paper presents a method to analyse the interaction between the human user and a unilateral, wearable lower-limb exoskeleton. The lower-limb exoskeleton function was to compénsate for muscle weakness around the kneejoint. It isshown tha...

We present a design study for a lower-limb exoskeleton using model-based optimization techniques. A physically realistic combined human-exoskeleton model is fitted to data of regular human walking motions in different conditions using a least squares optimal control formulation. This helps to determine which torques would be required to make the human-exoskeleton system follow desired motions a...