Assistive technology forecasts better autonomy for people with lifelong disabilities and for the elderly facing motor decline. As the population of developed countries is becoming greyer, there is thus a high probability of observing a significant increase in the demand for assistive locomotion devices. Designing the controller for such devices is not trivial, and requires both to set up a compliant framework and to manage the cross adaptation between the device and its user (the so-called interface). Taking inspiration from neuromechanical principles governing human locomotion is an approach which is currently investigated by several groups to address these challenges.
Ruiz Garate, V., Parri, A., Yan, T., Munih, M., Lova, R. M., Vitiello, N., & Ronsse, R. (2016). Motor primitive-based control for lower-limb exoskeletons. 6th IEEE International Conference on Biomedical Robotics and Biomechatronics (BioRob), p. 655-661. https://doi.org/10.1109/BIOROB.2016.7523700