Design and Evaluation of the Lower-limb

Robotic Orthosis for Gait Rehabilitation Actuated

by Pneumatic Artificial Muscle

Dao Quy Thinh *

Shibaura Institute of Technology, Tokyo, Japan
Email: nb16505@shibaura-it.ac.jp

Duong Minh Duc and Do Trong Hieu

Hanoi University of Science and Technology, Hanoi, Vietnam
Email: duc.duongminh@hust.edu.vn

Abstract In this study, a robotic orthosis for lower-limb
rehabilitation training is developed. The robot includes two
hip and knee joints. Each joint is actuated by a pneumatic
artificial muscle (PAM) in an antagonistic configuration.
The bi-articular muscles are used to increase the stiffness of
robotic orthosis. The robotic orthosis is evaluated not only
by comparing to the normal human walking but also in
trajectory tracking control mode. The experiment results
show that the angle trajectory of the robotic orthosis is
closed to the trajectory of normal human walking and it can
also guide the subject to it designated trajectory.
Keywords gait training device, robot orthosis, pneumatic
artificial muscle.
I. INTRODUCTION
There are millions of people worldwide with
movement disability caused by neurological pathologies
such as spinal cord injury (SCI), stroke or traumatic brain
injury. Lower limb rehabilitation devices such as robotic
orthosis based on treadmill and body weight supported
(BWS) can help the patients improve their recovery and
assist therapists by supporting them to perform the
repetitive movement in the rehabilitation process. Despite
the fact that several systems have been ready on the
market, the demand for improvement of those systems
still poses difficulties in both hardware and control design
perspective.
The most popular trademark robotic orthosis is
LOKOMAT. The LOKOMAT can execute many training
strategies include assist-as-needed (AAN), interactive, or
patient cooperative. Since the electric motor actuator is
employed, the LOKOMAT have faced some issues such
as high friction, heavyweight [1, 2]. To overcome the
disadvantages of the LOKOMAT, a lightweight series
elastic actuator is used in LOPES instead. The LOPES
has three training modes including patient-in-charge,
robot-in-charge, and therapist-in-charge [3]. In the
first mode, the actuator has a low stiffness. So, the patient
can walk freely. In the second mode, the patient is forced
to follow a designated trajectory, and it also allows the
therapist to program the training exercise in the last mode.
However, only patient-in-charge mode has been
investigated [4]. Hussain et al. also develops the robotic
orthosis with AAN training strategy based on both
trajectory tracking and impedance control [5-7]. However,
the interaction torque between subject and robotic
orthosis is estimated offline and cannot adapt to the
different level of disability of patients.
In our previous studies [8, 9], a gait training system
based on the body weight support and the treadmill is
developed. The antagonistic configuration of PAM is
adopted to actuate the robotic orthosis. In order to
increase the stiffness of both hip and knee joints, two
pairs of mono-articular and one additional pair of the bi-
articular muscles are employed. The contraction model
control scheme is then applied as the control strategy of
the system. However, the system only shows good
trajectory tracking performance without the participation
of the subject.
In this research, a new robotic orthosis is designed to
satisfy two criterions. First, the orthosis must have a safe
and comfortable mechanism. Second, the stiffness is high
enough to support the patient movement during training.
Both requirements of the developed orthosis are verified
by experiments.
To this end, the remaining parts of this paper are
organized as follows. The robotic orthosis design and its
evaluation are introduced in section II. Section III
presents the model of antagonistic muscle. The
experiment results and future works are carried out in
section IV and V, respectively.
 II. ROBOT ORTHOSIS DESIGN

Figure 1. The AIRGAIT robotic orthosis.

TABLE I. SPECIFICATIONS OF AIRGAIT ORTHOSIS.

DOFs Range of angle Range of slider
Hip joint 600 / 600 30 cm
Knee joint 900 / 00 19 cm
In this section, a two DOF robotic orthosis named
AIRGAIT based on treadmill training is developed. The
frame length of the orthosis can be changed to fit the body
of the subjects by the sliders and fixed by the screw during
training. The knee exoskeleton is designed with L-shape to
optimize the movement of the bi-articular muscle. The
specifications of each DOF are provided in Table I. The
PAMs are used to actuate the robotic orthosis. In
comparison with the previous studies [8, 9], an additional
couple of PAMs is used in hip joint to increase the stiffness
of the orthosis. The position of each antagonistic actuator
can also be varied to fit the body of the subject. The length
of the muscles for each joint is given in Table II.
Each antagonistic muscle is supplied by a proportional
electric control valve (ECV) ITV2000/3000 produced by
SMC company. The contactless Hall-IC angle sensor CP-
20H of Midori Precisions is attached for measuring the
angle motion of each knee and hip joint. The real-time
CompactRIO controller from National Instrument is
employed to collect the data from the angle sensor as well
as control the electric control valves. The real image of
the left AIRGAIT robotic orthosis is shown in Fig. 1.
III. THE ANTAGONISTIC MUSCLE MODEL
The typical configuration of an antagonistic muscle is
shown in Fig.2. The displacement of PAM from its initial
Figure 2. The antagonistic muscle configuration.
state can be estimated by the length of its free endpoint
trajectory arc. The relationship between the displacement
of the PAM and the measured angle is simplified as
l Ai Rii2 (1)
lPi Rii2 (2)
where i represents for the knee or hip joint of the
orthosis; l Ai and lPi are the displacements from the
initial length of the anterior and posterior PAM; i is the
joint angle and Ri is the rotation radius of the joint.
The contractions of each single PAM can be described
by the following equations:
l l Rii2
Ai im i 0 (3)
lim
lim li 0 Rii2
Pi (4)
lim
in which lim and li 0 are the length of the complete
deflation and the initial state of each PAM, respectively.
In (3) and (4), the contractions of both PAMs of
antagonistic muscle only depends on the measured angle
of the joint. Because the ECV valve can supply the
pressure proportional to its control voltage, the model of
antagonistic muscle can be simplified as a single input
single output (SISO) system where the input is the
difference voltage of two PAMs ECV, and the output is
the angle of the joint. The block diagram of the system is
shown in Fig. 6.

TABLE II. THE LENGTH AND INITIAL VOLTAGE TO ECV VALVES OF IV. EXPERIMENTAL EVALUATION
EACH PAMS.
TABLE III. THE INFORMATION OF THE SUBJECTS.
Knee joint Hip joint Bi-Articular
Parameters Femur
Anterior Posterior Anterior Posterior Anterior Posterior Information Weight Height Age
Length length
59.7 3.2 171.5 6.0 51.2 2.6 21.4 0.5
30 40 55 55 64 64
[cm] Value
Initial [kg] [cm] [cm] [year]
voltage 3.0 0.5 2.0 2.0 2.5 1.0
[v]
 The new design of the orthosis is evaluated based on
two following criterions. First, the orthosis must be
designed to ensure the safety and comfort of the patient
during training. Second, the orthosis can guide the patient
in its programmable motion. The evaluation procedure is
provided in detail as following.
A. Subjects
Five healthy male subjects participate in the
experiment. The information of the subjects is given in
Table III. (a) Subject A
B. The mechanical design of the robotic orthosis
evaluation
The new mechanical design of robotic orthosis is
evaluated by two steps. First, the subjects are asked to
walk on the treadmill without the orthosis. The angle
trajectories of the hip and knee joint are recorded by
K100 Amplifier Base Unit from Biometrics Ltd company
with the 1000 [Hz] sampling frequency. Second, the
subjects wear the orthosis which is set up at low stiffness.
Then the hip and knee joint angle trajectories of the
(b) Subject B
orthosis are measured and recorded. For both
experiments, the subjects walk in 2 minutes to familiar
with the experiment condition first and then the data is
recorded for 1 minutes. The treadmill speed is set at 2.5
[km/h] for all experiments. This speed is the normal
walking speed of a healthy subject. The BWS is not used
in this mode because the subjects are healthy and do not
need any support.
The average value of hip and knee joint angle
trajectory in one gait cycle (GC) is given in Fig. 4 where
the blue line is the joint angle of the subject when normal (c) Subject C
walking and the red line is the measured value of the
angle sensor. The detail trajectories of each subject in one
gait cycle are depicted in Fig. 4. The results show that
there are large delays between the trajectories of the
orthosis and the normal walking of the subject B and D
due to the difference between the size of the subject thigh
and the orthosis. Besides, when these subjects wear the
orthosis, the leg of the orthosis cannot be straight as the
human leg.
As shown in Fig. 5, the peak value of robotic orthosis
hip and knee joint when extension and flexion state are (d) Subject D
not much difference in comparison with the normal
walking of a subject.

(e) Subject E

Figure 3. The average value of angle trajectory of orthosis joint Figure 4. The angle trajectory of the orthosis compared to the normal
compared to subject normal walking in one gait cycle. walking of each subject (a) Subject A, (b) Subject B, (c) Subject C, (d)
Subject D, (e) Subject E.
 TABLE IV. PARAMETERS OF EACH PI CONTROLLERS
Knee joint Hip joint Bi-Articular
Parameters
controller controller controller
KP
0.06 0.015 0.015
[V/Degree]
Ti [s] 0.05 0.06 0.045

Figure 5. The peak value of orthosis angle compared to normal

walking.

This experiment results demonstrate that the angle

trajectory of the AIRGAIT orthosis is similar to the
human walking trajectory. Hence, the subject can feel
comfortable while wearing the orthosis during training.
C. Trajectory tracking control
In order to fulfill the second requirement, the orthosis
is set up with trajectory tracking control mode. In this
mode, the orthosis has high stiffness and can guide the
subject to its designated trajectory. A simple feedback
PI controller is used to evaluate the tracking performance
as illustrated Fig. 6. To protect the PAMs, the input
pressure is restricted at 0.5 [MPa].

The reference trajectory i* of each joint is

determined by the angle data collected from the
experiments in part B of this section. The reference
trajectories k* and h* are the inputs for the knee and hip
joint mono-articular muscle control loop, respectively.
The sum of k* and h* is the reference value for the bi-
articular actuator. In this experiment, the sampling
frequency of the PI controller is 500 [Hz]. By using the
trial and error technique, all parameters of the
controller are found and listed in Table IV.
To evaluate the robustness of the control system,
another subject, who does not belong to the group
mentioned in part A of this section, is asked to take part
in this experiment. The experiment results are shown in
Fig. 7. It can be observed that without a subject, the
maximum tracking error (MTE) of both hip and knee
joints are less than 4 0 . With the participation of the
subject, the tracking performance is just slightly degraded
where the MTE is about 5 0 . These results are acceptable
for a practical system.

Figure 7. Hip and knee angle trajectory in the percentage of GC during

trajectory tracking mode (a) Knee joint. (b) Hip joint (c) Bi-actuator.

V. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORKS

In this study, a new orthosis robotic system based on
Figure 6. The trajectory tracking control diagram of AIRGAIT the PAMs is developed. By using PAMs as the actuators,
orthosis joint angle. the developed system is flexible and comfortable for the
patients. Besides, the system is also capable of adapting
to the subject body size and generating human walking
trajectory. The feasibility of the developed orthosis is
confirmed by experiment results with various subjects.
Due to the nonlinearity of the PAM, high tracking
accuracy cannot be achieved with a simple PI controller.
Hence, advanced control techniques are needed to further
enhance the system performance in future.

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