Estimating the contact forces and moments (CFMs) between exoskeletons' feet and the ground is a prerequisite for calculating exoskeletons' joint moments. However, comfortable, portable, and high-precision force sensors for CFM detection are difficult to design and manufacture. In addition, there are many unknown CFM components (six force components and six moment components in the double-support phase). These reasons make it challenging to estimate CFMs precisely. In this paper, we propose a novel method for estimating these CFMs based on a proposed dynamic decoupled coordinate system (DDCS) and the minimum energy hypothesis. By decomposing these CFMs into a DDCS, the number of unknowns can be significantly reduced from twelve to two. Meanwhile, the minimum energy hypothesis provides a relatively reliable target for optimizing the remaining two unknown variables. We verify the accuracy of this method using a public data set about human walking. The validation shows that the proposed method is capable of estimating CFMs. This study provides a practical way to estimate the CFMs under the soles, which contributes to reducing the research and development costs of exoskeletons by avoiding the need for expensive plantar sensors. The sensor-free approach also reduces the dependence on high-precision, portable, and comfortable CFM detection sensors, which are usually difficult to design.
Keywords: dynamic decoupled coordinate system; exoskeleton; ground contact force and moment estimation; minimum energy hypothesis.