The Robustness and Energy Evaluation of a Linear Quadratic Regulator for a Rehabilitation Hip Exoskeleton

Sammanfattning: The implications of gait disorder, muscle weakness, and spinal cord injuries for work and age-related mobility degradation have increased the need for rehabilitation exoskeletons. Specifically, the hip rehabilitation exoskeletons due to a high percentage of the mechanical power is generated by this join during the gait cycle. Additionally, the prolonged hospitalisation after hip replacement and acetabular surgeries that affect human mobility, the social-economic impacts and the quality of life. For these reasons, a hip rehabilitation exoskeleton was our focus in this research, as it will contribute being a sustainable solution to take over the burden of physiotherapy and let patients perform their rehabilitation at home or outdoors. This thesis details an approach of creating a hip rehabilitation exoskeleton, starting with modelling, simulating, and controlling the rehabilitation hip joint in a based-simulation environment. The mathematical model and the reason for using a series elastic actuator in the hip joint to execute the movement in a sagittal plane are more detailed. Because trajectory tracking is commonly used for controlling rehabilitation exoskeletons to ensure safe and reliable motion tracking methods; therefore, two desired torque signals were tested and analysed with the optimal linear quadratic regulator (LQR). The experiments were performed using two torque signals of a healthy hip joint—representing the sit-to-stand (STS) and the walking activity for their importance in lower limb movements. However, the mathematical model used as a basis of the optimal control strategy is usually influenced by multiple sources of uncertainties. Therefore, four case studies of various optimal control strategies were tested for a twofold reason: to choose the most optimal control strategy, and to test the energy consumption of these cases during the STS and walking movements, because the long-term goal is to produce a lightweight and reliable rehabilitation hip exoskeleton.The research showed compelling evidence that tuning the control strategy will not influence the robustness of an optimal controller only, but affect the energy consumption during the STS and walking activity, which needs to be considered in exoskeleton control design regarding its applications.