A Self-Adaptive-Coefficient-Double-Power Sliding Mode Control Method for Lower Limb Rehabilitation Exoskeleton Robot

Lower limb rehabilitation exoskeleton robots have the characteristics of nonlinearity and strong coupling, and they are easily disturbed during operation by environmental factors. Thus, an accurate dynamic model of the robot is difficult to obtain, and achieving trajectory tracking control of the robot is also difficult. In this article, a self-adaptive-coefficient double-power sliding mode control method is proposed to overcome the difficulty of tracking the robot trajectory. The method combines an estimated dynamic model with sliding mode control. A nonlinear control law was designed based on the robot dynamics model and computational torque method, and a compensation term of control law based on double-power reaching law was introduced to reduce the disturbance from model error and environmental factors. The self-adaptive coefficient of the compensation term of the control law was designed to adaptively adjust the compensation term to improve the anti-interference ability of the robot. The simulation and experiment results show that the proposed method effectively improves the trajectory tracking accuracy and anti-interference ability of the robot. Compared with the traditional computed torque method, the proposed method decreases the tracking error by more than 71.77%. The maximum absolute error of the hip joint and knee joint remained below 0.55° and 1.65°, respectively, in the wearable experiment of the robot.