Admittance Control of Wearable Robotic Brace for Dynamic Trunk Support

Abstract

This paper presents a robotic trunk support system applying admittance control to assist trunk support and train the trunk core muscle groups. There are three degrees of freedom in the coronal plane, which allows lateral bending. The robotic trunk support system is designed based on a planer parallel manipulator. Position control makes the robot less flexible, and force control hardly maintains the position and orientation. The proposed admittance controller can improve the compliance of the robot and maintain the thorax at desired equilibrium. The experiments are conducted to evaluate the performance of the controller and the effect on the human body. The results demonstrate that the proposed wearable robotic brace can intervene in the activities of trunk core muscle groups and maintain trunk posture, which shows potential advantages in trunk support and rehabilitation.