Learning-based Walking Assistance Control Strategy for a Lower Limb Exoskeleton with Hemiplegia Patients

Lower exoskeleton has gained considerable interests in walking assistance applications for both paraplegia and hemiplegia patients. In walking assistance of hemiplegia patients, the exoskeleton should have the ability to control the affected leg to follow the unaffected leg's motion naturally. One critical issue of walking assistance for hemiplegia patients is how to adapt the controller of both lower limbs with different patients. This paper presents a novel learning-based walking assistance control strategy for lower exoskeleton with hemiplegia patients. In the proposed control strategy, we modeled the control system of lower exoskeleton with hemiplegia patient as a Leader-Follower Multi-Agent System (LF -MAS). In order to adapt different patients with different conditions, reinforcement learning framework is utilized to adapt controllers online. In reinforcement learning framework with LF-MAS, we employed a Policy Iteration Adaptive Dynamic Programming (PI-ADP) algorithm, which aims to achieve better tracking control performance for lower exoskeleton with hemiplegia patient. We demonstrate the efficiency of proposed learning-based walking assistance control strategy in an exoskeleton system with healthy subjects who simulate hemiplegia patients. Experimental results indicate that the proposed control strategy can adapt different pilots with good tracking performance.