Design and control concepts of an exoskeleton for gait rehabilitation

Abstract

Robotic gait rehabilitation faces many challenges regarding ankle assistance, body weight support and physical human-robot interaction. This paper reports on the development of a gait rehabilitation exoskeleton prototype intended as a platform for the evaluation of design and control concepts in view of improved physical human-robot interaction. The performance of proxy-based sliding mode control as a ldquorobot-in-chargerdquo control strategy is evaluated both in simulation and in experiments on a test setup. Compared to PID control, test results indicate good tracking performance and in particular safe system behavior.