Power assistive devices have been developed in recent years. To detect the wearer’s motion, conventional devices require users to wear sensors. However, wearing many sensors increases the wearing time, and usability of the device will become worse. We developed a soft gait assistive suit actuated by pneumatic artificial rubber muscles (PARMs) and proposed its control method. The proposed suit is easy to wear because the attachment unit does not have any electrical sensors that need to be attached to the trainee’s body. A target application is forward walking exercise on a treadmill. The control unit detects the pre-swing phase in the gait cycle using the pressure information in the calf back PARMs. After the detection, the suit assists the trainee’s leg motion. The assist force is generated by the controlled PARM pressure, and the pressure input time is changed appropriately considering the gait cycle time. We conducted walking experiments; (1) verifies the proposed control method works correctly, and (2) verifies whether the gait assistive suit is effective for decreasing muscular activity. Finally, we confirmed that the accurate phase detection can be achieved by using the proposed control method, and the suit can reduce muscular activity of the trainee’s leg.

In this paper, a pneumatically-driven walking assistive device is proposed. Since the structure of the exoskeleton is different from users' legs, it is not required to attach the exoskeleton links to the user's knee and adjust the length of the links. McKibben type pneumatic artificial muscles are adopted as the actuators, realizing back-drivability. We proposed a control method with the detection of the walking intention of the user using air pressure sensors isolated from the device itself, without attaching sensors to the user. The actuators are pre-pressurized and then the difference of the pressure is monitored and used as the trigger to starting the assist. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed system and the intention detection method.

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