Controlling the interaction forces between a human and an exoskeleton is
crucial for providing transparency or adjusting assistance or resistance
levels. However, it is an open problem to control the interaction forces of
lower-limb exoskeletons designed for unrestricted overground walking. For these
types of exoskeletons, it is challenging to implement force/torque sensors at
every contact between the user and the exoskeleton for direct force
measurement. Moreover, it is important to compensate for the exoskeleton's
whole-body gravitational and dynamical forces, especially for heavy lower-limb
exoskeletons. Previous works either simplified the dynamic model by treating
the legs as independent double pendulums, or they did not close the loop with
interaction force feedback.
The proposed whole-exoskeleton closed-loop compensation (WECC) method
calculates the interaction torques during the complete gait cycle by using
whole-body dynamics and joint torque measurements on a hip-knee exoskeleton.
Furthermore, it uses a constrained optimization scheme to track desired
interaction torques in a closed loop while considering physical and safety
constraints. We evaluated the haptic transparency and dynamic interaction
torque tracking of WECC control on three subjects. We also compared the
performance of WECC with a controller based on a simplified dynamic model and a
passive version of the exoskeleton. The WECC controller results in a
consistently low absolute interaction torque error during the whole gait cycle
for both zero and nonzero desired interaction torques. In contrast, the
simplified controller yields poor performance in tracking desired interaction
torques during the stance phase.Comment: 17 pages, 12 figure