Multi Degree of Freedom Hybrid FES and Robotic Control of the Upper Limb

Individuals who have suffered a spinal cord injury often require assistance to complete daily activities, and for individuals with tetraplegia, recovery of upper-limb function is among their top priorities. Hybrid functional electrical stimulation (FES) and exoskeleton systems have emerged as a potential solution to provide upper limb movement assistance. These systems leverage the user’s own muscles via FES and provide additional movement support via an assistive exoskeleton. To date, these systems have focused on single joint movements, limiting their utility for the complex movements necessary for independence. In this paper, we extend our prior work on model predictive control (MPC) of hybrid FES-exo systems and present a multi degree of freedom (DOF) hybrid controller that uses the controller’s cost function to achieve desired behavior. In studies with neurologically intact individuals, the hybrid controller is compared to an exoskeleton acting alone for movement assistance scenarios incorporating multiple degrees-of-freedom of the limb to explore the potential for exoskeleton power consumption reduction and impacts on tracking accuracy. Additionally, each scenario is explored in simulation using the models required to generate the MPC formulation. The two DOF hybrid controller implementation saw reductions in power consumption and satisfactory trajectory tracking in both the physical and simulated systems. In the four DOF implementation, the experimental results showed minor improvements for some joints of the upper limb. In simulation, we observed comparable performance as in the two DOF implementation.