A method to control hip torque during walking by wire tension adapted to thigh

Abstract

In the field of virtual reality, there are many researches on haptic force presentation. We suppose these haptic devices can be applied to training. Our goal is to make a training system which can control exercise load during walking and can make the exercise variable according to user’s purpose automatically. In this study, we propose a method to control hip torque as a measure of exercise load during walking by wire tension attached to thigh. The control profile of the wire to exhibit a desired hip torque is generated from database composed of pairs of control profile and hip torque. We proposed two algorithms to generate the control profile. One is based on simple matching using cross-correlation, the other is based on classification using Support Vector Machine. We evaluated the effectiveness of these two algorithms.