Control of an upper extremity exoskeleton robot to provide active assistive therapy

To provide movement assistance and rehabilitation therapy to the human upper extremity, we have developed a wearable robot, ETS-MARSE. In this paper, we have developed and implemented a nonlinear control strategy (with sliding mode control and exponential reaching law) to maneuver the robot and to provide active arm movement therapy. To evaluate the controller´s performance and that of the ETS-MARSE in regards to providing the therapeutic exercises, experiments involving healthy human subjects were performed with the developed ETS-MARSE. Results of these experiments indicate that with the proposed control strategy, ETS-MARSE can effectively deliver active assistive rehabilitation exercises.