Nonlinear Disturbance Observer-Based Control Design for a Robotic Exoskeleton Incorporating Fuzzy Approximation

To perform power augmentation tasks of a robotic exoskeleton, this paper utilizes fuzzy approximation and designed disturbance observers to compensate for the disturbance torques caused by unknown input saturation, fuzzy approximation errors, viscous friction, gravity, and payloads. The proposed adaptive fuzzy control with updated parameters' mechanism and additional torque inputs by using the disturbance observers are exerted into the robotic exoskeleton via feedforward loops to counteract to the disturbances. Through such an approach, the system does not need any requirement of built-in torque sensing units. In order to validate the proposed framework, extensive experiments are conducted on the upper limb exoskeleton using the state feedback and output feedback control to illustrate the performance of the proposed approaches.