Preliminary Experiments on Physiological Gait Movement of the Powered Gait Orthosis

Body weight supported treadmill training (BWSTT) has been confirmed to be an effective gait rehabilitation therapy for patients with locomotor dysfunction of the lower limbs. Powered Gait Orthosis (PGO) is a pair of powered mechanical legs in exoskeleton structure, which can guide the patient´s legs to move in a preprogrammed physiological gait pattern during BWSTT. A prototype of single-leg PGO has been designed and constructed. It has linear actuators at hip and knee joints; it is also instrumented with sensors and encoders. To realize the physiological gait movement of the single-leg PGO, a control platform, a safe protection device, and a set-point gait motion control method have been developed. The effectiveness of the proposed set-point gait motion control method is confirmed by the preliminary experimental results..