Adaptive robust force control of an underactuated walking lower limb hydraulic exoskeleton

This paper presents an adaptive robust interaction force control algorithm for an underactuated walking lower limb hydraulic exoskeleton. In order to deal with the problem of passive joints (less of control inputs), holonomic constraints from the wearer are considered in system dynamics, which help transform the underactuated exoskeleton dynamics into fully actuated dynamics in Cartesian space. Based on the established dynamic model, adaptive robust interaction force controllers are presented both for the phase of double leg support and single leg support to effectively deal with multiple walking phases, negative effect of high-order nonlinearities of hydraulic systems as well as various model uncertainties and external disturbances. An additional torque allocation method is proposed to deal with the over-actuated characteristic in double leg support phase. Comparative simulations are carried out. The results demonstrate that the proposed force controller can achieve precision and strong robust interaction force control performance to load change and variation of the human trajectory.