Towards Lower Limbs Functional Rehabilitation through a Knee Joint Exoskeleton

International audienceThis paper presents a bounded control strategy of a knee-joint exoskeleton that ensures knee flexion/extension movements during the assistance and rehabilitation processes. The control strategy is easy to implement, since it does not require any prior knowledge of the human effort. The proposed control law is based on nested saturations with the main advantage of explicitly avoiding the actuator's saturation, guaranteeing and enhancing the wearer's security. Lyapunov-based analysis is stated to prove: 1) the asymptotic stability of the shank-foot-exoskeleton in the absence of a human active effort; 2) the trajectories ultimate boundedness in the presence of parameter uncertainties; and 3) the input-to-state stability with respect to a bounded human active torque. Preliminary real-time experiments show satisfactory results in terms of assistance-as-needed and passive/resistive rehabilitation performances following desired trajectories expressing knee flexion/extension movements