Optimal Task-Invariant Energetic Control for a Knee-Ankle Exoskeleton

Task-invariant control methods for powered exoskeletons provide flexibility in assisting humans across multiple activities and environments. Energy shaping control serves this purpose by altering the human body's dynamic characteristics in closed loop. Our previous work on potential energy shaping alters the gravitational vector to reduce the user's perceived gravity, but this method cannot provide velocity-dependent assistance. The interconnection and damping assignment passivity-based control (IDA-PBC) method provides more freedom to shape a dynamical system's energy through the interconnection structure of a port-controlled Hamiltonian system model. This letter derives a novel energetic control strategy based on IDA-PBC for a backdrivable knee-ankle exoskeleton. The control law provides torques that depend on various basis functions related to gravitational and gyroscopic terms. We optimize a set of constant weighting parameters for these basis functions to obtain a control law that produces able-bodied joint torques during walking on multiple ground slopes. We perform experiments with an able-bodied human subject wearing a knee-ankle exoskeleton to demonstrate reduced activation in certain lower-limb muscles.