A novel parallel mechanism designed for walking assistance

Because of the limited space and enormous forces in the human foot, researchers generally simplified the foot as a rigid body in the development of lower extremity exoskeletons and biped humanoid robots, which led to unsatisfying performance on flexibility and auto-stability. In this paper, we propose a novel parallel mechanism with seven degrees of freedom (DOF) to realize the main possible movements of the foot segments which are defined as a flexible structure. In order to verify the feasibility of the mechanism worn on the foot for walking assistance, we implemented the foot kinematics and kinetics analysis by using the AnyBody Modelling System.