Bounded control of an actuated lower limb orthosis

Wearable robots have defined a new horizon for elderly and disabled people, to regain control of their limbs, as well as for healthy people, to increase their abilities of hard missions execution. The present paper deals with the control of a lower limb orthosis applied at the knee joint level for rehabilitation purposes. A bounded control torque is developed in order to guarantee the asymptotic stability of the knee orthosis. The control law respects the physical constraints of the system. Moreover, it is robust with respect to external disturbances. The effectiveness of the control torque is tested in real-time using the EICOSI orthosis of the LISSI Lab.