Swarm-initialized adaptive controller with beetle antenna searching of wearable lower limb exoskeleton for sit-to-stand and walking motions.

Abstract

In recent years, exoskeleton robots have attracted great interest from researchers in the area of robotics due to their ability to assist human functionality improvement. A wearable lower limb exoskeleton is aimed at supporting the limb functionality rehabilitation process and to assist physical therapists. Development of a stable and robust control system for multi-joint rehabilitation robots is a challenging task due to their non-linear dynamic systems. This paper presents the development of a Swarm-Initialized Adaptive (SIA) based controller, which is a combination of a swarm-based intelligence, named Swarm Beetle Antenna Searching (SBAS), and an adaptive Lyapunov-based controller. The SBAS initializes the parameters of SIA to efficiently improve the performance of the control system and then these controller parameters are updated by an adaptive controller. The control system is validated in a lower limb exoskeleton prototype with four degrees of freedom, using a healthy human subject for sit-to-stand and walking motions. The experimental results show the applicability of the proposed method and demonstrate that our approach obtained efficient control performance in terms of steady-state error and robustness and can be used for a lower limb exoskeleton to improve human mobility.