Abstract
For people who have the ability to complete basic movements (i.e. sit, stand up and up-down the stairs, etc…), the objective of this thesis is aimed to design and implement a Wearable Hybrid Assisted Lower Limb Orthosis (HALLO), which could provide 10% of knee torque from active device, reducing the burden of knee, and slow down the degradation of knee joint. This thesis is developed based on the first generation of HALLO, but to improve its shortcomings, it will thus be re-designed by new methods. The goal is to make this wearable assistive devices more compact, and practical. To achieve these objectives, a special designed M-shaped flexible rod [23] is adopted to store the potential energy between different human body gestures, such as stand and sit, then a DC motor is adopted as a variable damper, to control the releasing rate of potential energy from the flexible rod. Anti-acting of these two forces to perform appropriate leg providing assisting-torque to the knee, then with a discrete-time output feedback sliding-mode controller design [18] is applied to achieve the goals more efficiently. Finally, wearing the device to perform a variety of basic movements are presented through experiments. And the efficacy is further verified by investigating the EMG (electromyogram) signals.