Development of a Lower Limb Exoskeleton Worn on the Front of a Human

This paper introduces a new concept of a lower limb exoskeleton, KUEX, and its control framework. KUEX is a fully actuated system and is developed for a wearer’s walking assistance and sit-to-stand/stand-to-sit assistance. Because of full actuation, it is able to balance by itself and assist the wearer’s weight directly. Also, it is worn on the wearer’s front side. As the reason, it is easy to wear the robot and is able to reduce wearing time. The control framework for KUEX is composed with a walking pattern generator and various controllers to operate the robot based on the finite state machine. The hardware and the control framework of KUEX were verified through the various experiments.