Speed adaptation and acceleration ripple suppression of treadmill user system using a virtual force moment balance model

Abstract

To achieve treadmill speed adaption to the user’s walking speed and reduce treadmill acceleration ripples during walking for enhancing a non-intrusive walking sense, this paper presents a novel strategy to analytically design the acceleration of treadmill by introducing a virtual force and a virtual force moment balance kinetic model. To explicitly handle the treadmill velocity to adapt the user’s walking speed as well as treadmill acceleration ripples, the designed acceleration of treadmill and its derivative are specially selected as the input variables of treadmill controller. Since the user’s relative position and absolute walking speed are all taken into account, the resulting velocity and acceleration ripples of treadmill can be properly updated to improve the sense of reality during the user walking by only tuning the defined design parameters and control parameters. The experiments are conducted and the effective of the proposed strategy is verified by results.

Optimal Frequency and Amplitude of Vertical Viewpoint Oscillation for Improving Vection Strength and Reducing Neural Constrains on Gait

“…The speed command of the treadmill system was updated through an embedded ARM controller with a frequency of 100 Hz. The custom-made treadmill system has been proved valid in our previous works [ 13 , 14 ]. The Unity3D software was used to build the VR scene in Figure 1 .…”