Adaptive control of a human-driven knee joint orthosis

The paper concerns the control of a lower limb orthosis acting on the knee joint level. Therefore, a model of the shank-orthosis system is given considering the human effort as an external torque acting on the system. A model reference adaptive control law is developed and applied to the orthosis in order to make the system (shank-orthosis) track a desired trajectory predefined by a rehabilitation doctor. The main advantage of this control law is the on-line parameters regulation allowing to ensure the best performance of the system. A Lyapunov-based analysis is performed to prove the input-to-state stability of the orthosis with respect to a bounded human torque. The performance of the system is then shown through some simulations.