Control Strategy and Experiment of a Novel Hydraulic-Driven Upper Extremity Exoskeleton

In this paper, we introduce a novel hydraulic-driven upper extremity exoskeleton and present new type of force feedback control strategy, and the control experiment is also carried out. The experimental results show that the first generation upper extremity exoskeleton successfully follows the wearer’s hand movements and achieve load capacity of 20 kg. The experimental results also indicate that the new type force feedback control can effectively reduce the interaction force between the wearer and the upper extremity exoskeleton and the oscillation. Compared with the control method simply using interaction force as the control input, the method with speed compensation controller can effectively reduce the amplitude and oscillation of the interaction force.