Hip exoskeleton switches between bench and backpack modes quickly
A Reconfigurable Bidirectional Cable-Driven Hip Exoskeleton with Swappable Bench/Backpack Dual-configuration Actuation
Robotics
Summary
Hip exoskeletons help people walk or recover leg movement but usually need either lots of power in labs or portable setups for outside use. The authors created a hip exoskeleton that can easily swap between a heavy, bench-mounted mode and a lightweight, backpack mode while using the same parts worn on the body. They tested it with people to show it tracks movement well in both setups and can switch back and forth quickly. This makes it easier for developers to build and test these devices for different uses without making new hardware each time.
What this means in practice
- •For rehabilitation device developers: Build and test hip exoskeletons using one hardware platform that works both in lab setups and portable outdoor use.
- •For wearable robotics engineers: Create adaptable hip exoskeletons that quickly switch between different actuation modes for research or practical assistance.
Authors
YuanLong Ji, Shuhan Xiang, Qihan Ye, Xingbang Yang
Abstract
Hip exoskeletons provide an important hardware basis for lower-limb rehabilitation and locomotor assistance. Laboratory rehabilitation assessment and system development require substantial actuation and computing resources, whereas mobile assistance requires untethered portability. Integrating both capabilities within one reusable platform remains a central design challenge. This paper presents a reconfigurable bidirectional cable-driven hip exoskeleton platform that rapidly switches between bench-mounted and backpack-mounted actuation while sharing one cable-free wearable hip interface. The platform modularly adapts the actuation configuration, end-effector sensing path, and low-level control interface. Each cable-driven end-effector weighs 0.405 kg, excluding the cable and actuation unit, and integrates an encoder and a torque sensor; experiments validated bench-mounted admittance-based motion tracking capability and backpack-mounted open-loop torque tracking. Human-worn experiments with three healthy participants used myoMOTION to evaluate the platform's wearable-side hip-motion sensing capability, verified bench-to-backpack and backpack-to-bench motion-ready switching across 30 trials in $30.1\pm16.3$ s, and formed a small-scale multimodal wearable-exoskeleton gait dataset for sensing validation and data-driven algorithm development, comprising 8 min bench-mounted treadmill records and 11 min backpack-mounted outdoor walking records. These results show that, by unifying the wearable structure, actuation interface, and sensing path, the proposed platform enables validation of the same hip exoskeleton in both bench-mounted and backpack-mounted configurations, providing reusable hardware for iterative development and applications across scenarios.