Event-Triggered Sliding Mode Impulsive Control for Lower Limb Rehabilitation Exoskeleton Robot Gait Tracking

Abstract

Lower limb rehabilitation exoskeleton robots (LLRERs) play an important role in lower limb rehabilitation training and assistance walking for patients with lower limb movement disorders. In order to reduce and eliminate adverse effects on the accuracy of human motion gait tracking during walking with an LLRER, which is caused by the gravity and friction, the periodic ground shock force, and the human–exoskeleton interaction force, this paper proposes a feedforward–feedback hybrid control strategy of sliding mode impulsive control with gravity and friction compensation, based on the event-triggered mechanism of Lyapunov function. Firstly, to realize high-precision gait tracking with bounded error, some constraints on controller parameters are deduced by analyzing the Lyapunov-based stability. Secondly, the Zeno behavior of impulsive event triggers is excluded by the analysis of three different cases of the triggering time sequence. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed hybrid controller is verified by the numerical simulation of the LLRER human–exoskeleton integrated system based on a three-link simplified model. It shows that an event-triggered sliding mode impulsive control strategy with gravity and friction compensation can achieve complete gait tracking with bounded error and has excellent dynamic performance under the constraints.

Keywords

• lower limb exoskeleton
• human motion
• gait tracking
• event-triggered control
• sliding mode control
• impulsive control