Modeling and Simulation of an Assistive Exoskeleton Leg System With Knee Osteoarthritis and Quadriceps Weakness

Abstract

The most common human locomotion problems such as quadriceps weakness, knee osteoarthritis can be healed up by using exoskeleton mechanisms with proper control systems. However, these kinds of abnormalities cannot be easily modeled in terms of engineering perspectives due to a lack of adequate data or unknown dynamics. Also, nature always seeks minimum energy as well as biology, which means that the unknown dynamics can be built by using this phenomenon. In this study, a new system dynamic model had been involved in designing a simple single-legged exoskeleton robot mechanism and its control system to assist partially disabled individuals to improve their quality of locomotion. To determine the specific features of the human gait disorders to interpret their nature in the computer-aided simulation environment, knee osteoarthritis, and quadriceps weakness, which are the common types of such problems, have been chosen as the main interests for this study. By using the lower limb model with anthropometric data, the simulations of disorders have been realized on matlabsimscape environment, which enables us to model the entire exoskeleton system with the three-dimensional parts of the human body. A model of a leg with the disorder was able to be obtained with the utilization of feedback linearization, which is one of the examples of minimum principles in the control theory. A proper gait cycle is achieved with the exoskeleton application and separately for the leg, with approximately 10 deg deviation from the natural property in knee flexion. Finally, it can be seen that the system conversion into such problematic cases with or without an exoskeleton system is accomplished.