Making Bipedal Robot Experiments Reproducible and Comparable: The Eurobench Software Approach.

This study describes the software methodology designed for systematic benchmarking of bipedal systems through the computation of performance indicators from data collected during an experimentation stage. Under the umbrella of the European project Eurobench, we collected approximately 30 protocols with related testbeds and scoring algorithms, aiming at characterizing the performances of humanoids, exoskeletons, and/or prosthesis under different conditions. The main challenge addressed in this study concerns the standardization of the scoring process to permit a systematic benchmark of the experiments.

A novel human effort estimation method for knee assistive exoskeletons.

In this work we present a novel method to estimate online the torques at the knee joints with the goal to generate reference signals for knee assistive devices. One of the main advantages of the proposed approach is its reduced sensing requirements, which leads to an ergonomic setup with minimal instrumentation, especially above the knee and of the upper body. Indeed, only the measurement of the forces and torques exchanged between the ground and the user's feet, the posture of the shanks, and the model of the user's shank itself are needed for the estimation of the knee torque.