Abstract
A lower limb assistive exoskeleton is designed to help operators walk or carry payloads. The exoskeleton is required to shadow human motion intent accurately and compliantly to prevent incoordination. If the user's intention is estimated accurately, a precise position control strategy will improve collaboration between the user and the exoskeleton. In this paper, a hybrid position control scheme, combining sliding mode control (SMC) with a cerebellar model articulation controller (CMAC) neural network, is proposed to control the exoskeleton to react appropriately to human motion intent. A genetic algorithm (GA) is utilized to determine the optimal sliding surface and the sliding control law to improve performance of SMC. The proposed control strategy (SMC_GA_CMAC) is compared with three other types of approaches, that is, conventional SMC without optimization, optimal SMC with GA (SMC_GA), and SMC with CMAC compensation (SMC_CMAC), all of which are employed to track the desired joint angular position which is deduced from Clinical Gait Analysis (CGA) data. Position tracking performance is investigated with cosimulation using ADAMS and MATLAB/SIMULINK in two cases, of which the first case is without disturbances while the second case is with a bounded disturbance. The cosimulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed control strategy which can be employed in similar exoskeleton systems.