Saturated Sliding Mode Control Scheme for a New Wearable Back-Support Exoskeleton

Low back pain has been torturing people around the world as a common and chronic disease, the main inducement of which is lumbar disc herniation (LDH). To alleviate patients’ pain noninvasively, this paper proposes a new lumbar spinal rehabilitation exoskeleton. This exoskeleton is composed of two bands connected by four motor-driven piston pushrods, where the range of band can be adjusted to adapt to people with different waistlines. The four pushrods provide support forces to hold the upper body to relieve the burden of lumbar. The joints between pushrods and band are universal pairs and spherical pairs. The whole structure can be regarded as a parallel robot, thus the supporting and waist tracking performance can be determined by motion control effect of pushrods. Considering the motor torque of pushrods is limited, in this paper, a saturated sliding mode control scheme is proposed. Meanwhile, an extended state observer (ESO) is employed to estimate the external disturbance and internal uncertainties, then the estimates of perturbations will be compensated by the feedback scheme. Furthermore, to enhance the disturbance-tracking performance of the ESO an integrated sliding mode observer is proposed to compensate the tracking errors of ESO. The stabilities of controller and observers are proved by Lyapunov stability theory. Finally, a simulation and two experiments are conducted to verify the performance of the proposed controller and the new exoskeleton. The simulation results show that the novel/new controller can drive the new exoskeleton to move along with the desirable trajectory to support the upper body so that alleviating the burden of waist. The results of myoelectricity experiments also show favorable effectiveness of exoskeleton on supporting upper body in different postures. Note to Practitioners—this article was inspired by the concerns of low back pain that many people are suffering. Most existing rehabilitation robots tend to focus on supporting lower body and arms, while back-support rehabilitation robots are barely seen. Although we can see a few upper-body supporting robots in sporadic papers, these studies have not proposed a good control scheme yet. Besides, it is difficult to find a rehabilitation robot with simple structure as well as conforming to ergonomics. To resolve the shortcomings of the structure of existing robots and control models, we proposed a completely new rehabilitation robot with novel mechanical structure. Meanwhile, a new saturated sliding mode and novel integrated observer are employed in the position-force control system to enhance the stability and controllability of the whole robot control system. Then, some elaborately designed experiments are conducted to test the proposed robot and the control system. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed method can significantly increase the trajectory tracking performance and alleviate low back pain.