A hybrid control method of an exoskeleton robot for intention-driven walking rehabilitation of stroke patients

When the robotic exoskeleton is used for gait rehabilitation, the robot should recognize the intention of patients before moving. We can consider recognition of intentions for the robot as recognition of a time (when the patient wants to move) and a behavior (what the patient wants to do). In this paper, the intent-detection method consisting of a gait phase recognizer and a gait pattern generator using neural networks is introduced. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified briefly using recorded gait patterns.