Generalized Control Framework for Exoskeleton Robots by Interaction Force Feedback Control

This paper newly proposes a generalized control framework for exoskeletons. Motivated by the fact that the exoskeleton robot and its wearer physically interact by the force at each contact point and that this interaction depends on the controller used in the literature, the proposed method shows that the exoskeleton controllers can be generalized into a standard force feedback control system. To this end, the control system consists of the interaction force feedback control loop and the reference generation loop. The proposed method is advantageous in systematically implementing the conventional approaches and, moreover, extending it to other objectives. The proposed method is applied to a lower-limb exoskeleton, and verified by the experiments.