Control of an upper extremity exoskeleton robot to provide active assistive therapy

To provide movement assistance and rehabilitation therapy to the human upper extremity, we have developed a wearable robot, ETS-MARSE. In this paper, we have developed and implemented a nonlinear control strategy (with sliding mode control and exponential reaching law) to maneuver the robot and to provide active arm movement therapy. To evaluate the controller's performance and that of the ETS-MARSE in regards to providing the therapeutic exercises, experiments involving healthy human subjects were performed with the developed ETS-MARSE. Results of these experiments indicate that with the proposed control strategy, ETS-MARSE can effectively deliver active assistive rehabilitation exercises.