Coupling Disturbance Compensated MIMO Control of Parallel Ankle Rehabilitation Robot Actuated by Pneumatic Muscles

To solve the poor compliance and safety problems in current rehabilitation robots, a novel two-degrees-of-freedom (2-DOF) soft ankle rehabilitation robot driven by pneumatic muscles (PMs) is presented, taking advantages of the PM's inherent compliance and the parallel structure's high stiffness and payload capacity. However, the PM's nonlinear, time-varying and hysteresis characteristics, and the coupling interference from parallel structure, as well as the unpredicted disturbance caused by arbitrary human behavior all raise difficulties in achieving high-precision control of the robot. In this paper, a multi-input-multi-output disturbance compensated sliding mode controller (MIMO-DCSMC) is proposed to tackle these problems. The proposed control method can tackle the un-modeled uncertainties and the coupling interference existed in multiple PMs' synchronous movement, even with the subject's participation. Experiment results on a healthy subject confirmed that the PMs-actuated ankle rehabilitation robot controlled by the proposed MIMO-DCSMC is able to assist patients to perform high-accuracy rehabilitation tasks by tracking the desired trajectory in a compliant manner.