Mayumi Komatsu

Soft hip walking assist experimental system featuring variable compliance control

In this paper, we present a tethered soft assist experimental system for the hip, incorporating virtual compliant actuator model into the control system. We adjust the parameters of the virtual compliant actuator to generate assistance torques around the hip during walking. Experimental tests for level walking at 1.25 m/s shows that variable stiffness assist is capable of reducing the energy cost of walking on level ground by an average of 5.5% across 4 test subjects. This result confirms that our approach is capable of generating effective assistance.