Development of a hierarchical control strategy for a soft knee exoskeleton based on wearable multi-sensor system

Soft exoskeleton is a newly emerging approach for providing assistive forces to the movement of disabled individuals, which has aroused the interest of many researchers due to its promising prospects in rehabilitation training and motion assistance. In this article, a wearable wireless multi-sensor system and a hierarchical control architecture are developed for a soft knee exoskeleton. First, the major components of the soft knee exoskeleton are introduced, including the flexible Bowden-cable actuators, the soft wearable components, and the sensing modules and the control system. The wearable wireless multi-sensor system consists of an inertial measurement unit–based knee flexion–extension angle sensing module, a surface electromyogram–based joint torque estimation module, a miniature pulling force sensing module, and a central communication unit. And then, a three-level hierarchical control strategy—which fuses a high-level motion recognition and torque estimation algorithm, a mid-level knee trajectory generation strategy, and a low-level fuzzy impedance controller—is proposed to realize human motion assistance. Finally, experiments are carried out to verify the effectiveness of the proposed control strategy. The experimental setup is established with the soft knee exoskeleton, a treadmill, a wearable robotic rotary joint with an encoder, and an inelastic rope. The experimental result indicates that the root mean square errors of the joint angle estimation strategy and joint torque estimation strategy are less than 4.3° and 4.8 Nm, while the surface electromyogram–based assistance efficiency and torque-based assistance efficiency under different loading conditions are higher than 10.2% and 18.2%, respectively.