A Power-Aware Control Strategy for an Elbow Effort-Compensation Device

This work presents a reactive control strategy for loading and sudden unloading of an elbow effort-compensation device controlled in force. Through this control strategy, in addition to an individual's forearm weight, an external load can be detected and adaptively compensated via a feed-forward force reference, facilitating the execution of arbitrary movements by the wearer. In case of a sudden contact/load loss, a power-aware strategy is implemented to immediately eliminate the portion of external loading in the force reference. The adaptive compensation of the external loads is achieved through an electromyography interface. Instead, to react to sudden load releases, we set a power limit on the tendon, and continuously measure it through an encoder and a load cell connected with the cable. Two sets of experiments are designed to test the proposed load-releasing method on a bench-top setup with 2 kg, and 3.9 kg, and a human subject with 0.5 and 1 kg. Next, the overall scenario including load-compensation and load-releasing are carried out on eight human subjects with 0.5 and 1 kg loads to evaluate the release and compensation time, and the effort reduction with respect to non-powered exoskeleton case. Results show that the average compensation/release time (payload) among subjects is measured as 0.98/0.91 seconds (0.5 kg), and 1/0.86 seconds (1 kg). The average effort reduction among the subjects are also reported as 66.4%, and 67.11% for 0.5 kg, and 1 kg, respectively.