Super Twisting Control of Passive Gait Training Exoskeleton Driven by Pneumatic Muscles

Pneumatic Muscles (PMs) - driven exoskeleton has a promising prospect in the field of rehabilitation and assistance, because of the PMs intrinsic features of compliance and high force-to-weight ratio. However, the precise control of PMs-driven exoskeleton still remains a challenging problem due to the hysteresis, time-varying parameters of PMs and complexity of the mechanism. To solve this problem, this paper presents a super twisting controller (STC), essentially a second-order sliding mode control, to realize the human gait tracking control of lower limb exoskeleton. As a result, the disturbances and uncertainties of the system can be handled, and the chattering caused by the traditional sliding mode control (SMC) could be eliminated. The stability of the closed-loop system is ensured according to the Lyapunov theorem. In addition, we conduct experiments in real exoskeleton system and the results illustrate the validity of the super twisting algorithm..