A wearable robotic orthosis with a spring-assist actuator

This paper introduces a wearable robotic orthosis with spring-assist actuators, which is designed to assist people who have difficulty in walking. The spring-assist actuator consists of an electrical motor and a spring, which are attached to a rotational axis in parallel to each other. The spring-assist actuator is developed based on the analysis on the stiffness of the knee and hip joints during walking. “COWALK-Mobile,” which is a wearable robotic orthosis, is developed using the spring-assist actuators to reduce the required motor torque during walking. The COWALK-Mobile has active hip and knee joints and passive ankle joints to provide assistive torque to the wearer. The required joint torque is generated by the spring as well as the electrical motor, which results in a decrease of maximum required torque for the motor. In order to evaluate the performance of the spring-assist actuator, experiments are carried out. The experiments show that the spring-assist actuators reduced the required motor torque during walking.