Research on patients-passive control strategy of the rehabilitation exoskeleton based on NN-SMC

Abstract

There are amounts of patients with locomotor dysfunction caused by stroke until now. Body weight supported treadmill training (BWSTT) has proved to be an efficient method of rehabilitation training for those people. The lower exoskeleton consists of two legs which is used to guide and assist motions of patients with the help of weight support devices and a treadmill. A prototype of the body weight support exoskeleton rehabilitation device (BWSERD) has been designed in this paper, which contains two pairs of direct drives at hip and knee joints. It has also four torque transducers and four encoders. In order to conduct the patients-passive rehabilitation training after stroke, a control strategy based on neuro network and sliding mode controller is developed. The effectiveness of the proposed method is confirmed by the simulation results.