CONTROL STRATEGY FOR POWER ASSIST UPPER LIMB REHABILITATION ROBOT WITH THE THERAPIST'S MOTION INTENTION PREDICTION

Currently, fully automated rehabilitation robots can assist therapists in providing rehabilitation therapy, hence the patients could get hurt. On the other hand, manual treatment may cause less patient injury but it is tiresome, and there are not enough therapists in most countries. Power assist rehabilitation robots can support the therapists in conducting the treatment and may help to alleviate this problem. The goal of this study is to develop a control strategy for the robot to assist the therapist's movement in a power assist upper limb rehabilitation treatment. The system combines the advantages of robotic and manual rehabilitation therapy. Torque and position sensors fitted on the power assist upper limb rehabilitation robot arm are used for motion intention estimation. The amount of angular velocity necessary to be delivered to the feedback controller will be determined by predicting the therapist's motion intention using the impedance control method. The resulting velocity from the motion intention estimator is incorporated into the Sliding Mode Control - Function Approximation Technique (SMC-FAT) based adaptive controller. The SMC-FAT based adaptive controller in the feedback loop, overcomes the uncertain parameters in the combination of the robot and the human arm. The motion intention estimator forecasts the movement of therapists. The proposed controller is used to regulate elbow flexion and extension motion on a power assist upper limb rehabilitation robot with one degree of freedom (DOF). The proposed control system has been tested using MATLAB simulation and hardware experimental tests. The outcomes demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed controller in directing the rehabilitation robot to follow the desired trajectory based on the therapist's motion intention, with maximum errors of 0.002rad/sec, 0.005rad/sec and 0.02rad/sec for sinusoidal, constant torque values, and hardware experiment respectively.