A ballistic walking gait is designed for a planar biped equipped with a wearable walking assist device. The biped is a seven-link planar biped with two legs, two feet, and a trunk. The wearable walking assist device is composed of a bodyweight support, two upper legs, two lower legs, and two shoes. The dynamic model of the biped with its walking assist device, containing two closed kinematic chains, is calculated by virtually cutting each of both loops at one of their point. In the single support phase, the biped with its assist device moves due to the existence of a momentum, produced mechanically, without applying active torques in the inter-link joints. The biped and this assist device are controlled with impulsive torques at the instantaneous double support to obtain a cyclic gait. The impulsive torques are applied in the six inter-link joints of the biped and in several inter-link joints of the wearable walking assist device. The following distributions of impulsive torques, in the knees or the ankles, hips and knees, hips and ankles, or knees and ankles and the fully assist device, are compared with the case of no assistance for the biped. Each time, an infinity of solutions exists to find the impulsive torques. An energy cost functional defined from these impulsive torques is minimized to determine a unique solution. Numerical results show that for a given time period and a given length of the walking gait step, the assistance of the hips is a good compromise to help the biped.
['Yannick Aoustin']
Walking Gait of a Biped with a Wearable Walking Assist Device