A novel hip exoskeleton with six degrees of freedom (DoF) was developed, and multiple prototypes of this product were created in this thesis. The device was an upper level of the 12-DoF lower-body exoskeleton project, which was known as the Orthotic Lower-body Locomotion Exoskeleton (OLL-E). The hip exoskeleton had three motions per leg, which were roll, yaw, and pitch. Currently, the sufferers of hemiplegia and paraplegia can be addressed by using a wheelchair or operating an exoskeleton with aids for balancing. The motivation of the exoskeleton project was to allow paraplegic patients to walk without using aids such as a walker or crutches. In mechanical design, the hip exoskeleton was developed to mimic the behavior of a healthy person closely.

The hip exoskeleton will be fully powered by a custom linear actuator for each joint. To date, there are no exoskeleton products that are designed to have all of the hip joints powered. Thus, packaging of actuators was also involved in the mechanical design of the hip exoskeleton. As a result, the output torque and speed for the roll joint and yaw joint were calculated. Each hip joint was structurally designed with properly selected bearings, encoder, and hard stops. Their range of motions met desired requirements. In addition, a backpack assembly was designed for mounting the hardware, such as cooling pumps, radiators, and batteries. In the verification part, finite element analysis (FEA) was conducted to show the robustness of the structural design. For fit testing, three wearable prototypes were produced to verify design choices. As a result, the weight of the current hip exoskeleton was measured as 32.1 kg.