Miodrag Stoimenov

A Bipedal Mechanical Walker with Balancing Mechanism

Walkers are mechanical leg devices which perform motion similar to a physiological walk of animals or humans. They have many different usages among which the application for medical rehabilitation of injured persons not capable of walking is the most important. This paper presents the mechanism embedded in a mechanical walker by which the balancing of a human mass centre is accomplished. The benefit of such kind of mechanism is that a walker device with the balanced mass centre can be supplied with the feet of a smaller size. Moreover, it generates more pleasant walking movement, similar to the physiological bipedal motion. This mechanism has been calculated, 3D modelled and its operation simulated, analysed and numerically and graphically described. Finally, the motion of the chosen referent point on the mechanical walker obtained by the simulation is compared with the motion of the corresponding referent point on the human body acquired by camera. The results of this comparison disclosed that trajectories of the chosen referent points on the mechanical walker and human body are almost overlapped. Thus, it has been proven that the mechanism proposed in this paper is capable to balance the mass centre of a human body correctly.