Development of power assist system with motion estimation using model predictive control

Many kinds of control methods using electromyo-gram signals have been proposed for power-assist robots or electric prosthesises recently. However, it is considered that it is difficult to be adapted to unknown environment or conditions and to realize high power-assist ratio. Therefore, we propose a new power-assist system using model predictive control that can realize a stable power-assist with high ratio and predict the future human fingers touque and the future trajectory in real time. Our power-assist system is composed of a combination of a MPC system based on an expansion plant and a MPC system based on a plant model.