Research on the Design of a Lumbar Exoskeleton for Load Lifting

This paper focuses on passive-assisted lumbar exoskeleton for load lifting gait to reduce the load on human lumbar. The study aims to design the bionic spine, obtain the lumbar bending angle and the planning of each corner of the bionic spine through biomechanical simulation, and then a human-exoskeleton coupled dynamics model was built in ADAMS 2020 to verify the power-assisting nature of the elastic elements in this exoskeleton. The muscle active power simulation of load lifting was carried out with dynamics post-processing in combination with OpenSim 4.3. The results demonstrate that the exoskeleton provides up to 59% stability during the bending phase of the lifting gait and up to 71.1% power assistance during the lifting phase, thereby reducing the lumbar load on the wearer.