Low Obstacle Avoidance for Lower Limb Exoskeletons

Powered lower limb exoskeletons (LLEs) are innovative wearable robots that allow independent walking in people with severe gait impairments. Despite the recent advancements, the use of this promising technology is still restricted to clinical settings; uptake in real-life conditions as a device to promote user independence is still lacking due to the difficulty of controlling these devices in unstructured and complex environments. In this work, we propose a vision-assisted method for low obstacle avoidance to enhance the autonomy of LLEs. The exoskeleton collects information from the surroundings through a RGB-D camera to recognize and segment objects on the ground that might affect the walking pattern. Then, the method identifies suitable foothold positions. In addition, a novel iterative gait trajectory generator is proposed to automatically compute collision-free walking paths. We believe that re-thinking exoskeletons as semi-autonomous agents will represent not only the cornerstone to promote a more symbiotic human-exoskeleton interaction but may also pave the way for the use of this technology in the everyday life.