Safety Augmentation for Volitional Human Motion

User safety is a crucial factor to consider when designing control paradigms for lower-limb exoskeletons. Existing control paradigms of lower-limb exoskeletons mainly focus on providing assistance for human users under stable walking conditions, ignoring situations that human users may lose their balance due to external perturbations during walking. We therefore propose a safety framework for lower-limb exoskeletons to augment human safety based on Control Barrier Functions. The safety index is defined as the center of mass and swing foot position lying within a human user’s self-selected ranges. Instead of enforcing reference trajectories, we incorporate human inputs and preferences in a two-layer control structure based on Control Barrier Functions to facilitate safety augmentation for volitional human motion.

Journal Articles

• M. Yu, Q. Lin, and G. Lv, “Safety Augmentation for Volitional Human Locomotion via Lower-Limb Exoskeletons: A Case Study on Balance Control“, IEEE Control Systems Letters, 2024. PDF