Admittance Control based Hemiplegic Exoskeleton Motion Control

In this paper, a method based on admittance control is developed to improve patients’ comfort wearing an exoskeleton robot for rehabilitation training. In our previous work, we designed a modular and convenient hemiplegic exoskeleton robot. The mechanical structure will cause stiffness when it comes to contact with the human body in practical applications. We introduced admittance control to improve the flexibility of the exoskeleton robot and improve the subjects’ comfort. This paper considers coupling of model between the exoskeleton and the human body as the human-computer interaction force of the system at the main human-computer interaction point. Measuring the interaction force between exoskeleton members and limbs, the work uses the virtual admittance model to correct the system's inherent characteristics and studies the control method's stability with Lyapunov's theory. The experiment collected the subject movement information which was converted the movement information of the exoskeleton. Human-computer interaction forces in the thigh and calf were measured while the exoskeleton assisted the subject's movement. The experimental results show that adding the admittance controller reduces the human-computer interaction force from 5g to 2g and 6g to 3g, respectively.