Design and Control of a Pneumatic Artificial Muscle Actuated Exoskeleton Robot for Upper Limb Rehabilitation

doi:10.3901/JME.2025.03.225

Abstract

Abstract: A pneumatic artificial muscle (PAM) actuated exoskeleton is developed for upper limb rehabilitation and augmentation. Different from rigid actuation, the developed exoskeleton combines PAM and rigid link to achieve both flexible actuation and high-precision movement. This helps to reduce the risk of unwanted injury to users during the rehabilitation process. In structural design, a combination of direct driven and cable driven is adopted to provide 3 degrees-of-freedom actuation for the shoulder and elbow joints. The compact structure helps to facilitate its wearability. This research presents the kinematics modeling of the exoskeleton, and dynamic modeling is then finished using the three-element model of PAM and Lagrange method. For the hysteresis nonlinearity of PAM, the combination of direct inverse modeling and adaptive projection algorithm is adopted to achieve adaptive hysteresis compensation without offline modeling and inversion. Finally, the feasibility of the exoskeleton and the proposed controller is verified via hysteresis compensation and anti-interference experiments. Experimental results show that the developed exoskeleton features both flexible actuation and high motion accuracy, satisfying the needs of upper limb rehabilitation and augmentation.

Key words: pneumatic artificial muscle, upper limb exoskeleton, rehabilitation robot, hysteresis compensation

CLC Number:

TG156

QIN Yanding, FAN Jiade, ZHANG Haoqi, TIAN Mengqiang, HAN Jianda. Design and Control of a Pneumatic Artificial Muscle Actuated Exoskeleton Robot for Upper Limb Rehabilitation[J]. Journal of Mechanical Engineering, 2025, 61(3): 225-236.

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