Novel solutions on model-based and model-free robotic-assisted ankle rehabilitation

In this report, ankle rehabilitation routines currently approved by physicians are implemented via novel control algorithms on a recently appeared robotic device known as the motoBOTTE. The physician specifications for gait cycles are translated into robotic trajectories whose tracking is performed twofold depending on the availability of a model: (1) if obtained via the Euler-Lagrange approach along with identification of unknown plant parameters, a new computed-torque control law is proposed; it takes into account the parallel-robot characteristics; (2) if not available, a variation of the active disturbance rejection control technique whose parameters need to be tuned, is employed. A detailed discussion on the advantages and disadvantages of the model-based and model-free results, from the continuous-time simulation to the discrete-time implementation, is included.