Use of angular acceleration and velocity estimates for control of pneumatic-powered wearable motion assist device

The focus of this paper is to develop a control system for wearable motion assist device giving physical support for people who are doing physically demanding tasks. Two key technical issues in developing such a device are how to generate the reference trajectory for the actuator installed to provide appropriate motion support, and how to determine the strength and duration of assist to help complete current physical task. This paper tackles the use of joint angular acceleration and velocity estimates in the control of motion assist device. How the estimates are generated, how they are used in control and how the control system is organized to achieve performance requirements will be described. Several experiments have been conducted to test basic functionality of the developed 5 d.o.f. wearable assist device as well as to gain insights on how to tune physically motivated control system parameters.