Study of the control of an industrial exoskeleton with pneumatic actuation

The objectives of this work are the study, design and simulation of the control logic of an active exoskeleton for industrial applications. The device, thanks to the pneumatic implementation, has the task of producing a torque, equal to 30% of the torque produced by the human being, able to reduce human muscle fatigue at the hip joint. The introductory part presents the state of art and the basic concepts of the devices on the market. The thesis is divided into six chapters: the first section introduces the subject focusing on the introductory control scheme presented in previous works. In the next chapter it is analysed the various types of controllers that were suitable for our device. The third and fourth chapters present the model of control logic developed through studies in MATLAB, more precisely through the Simscape Multibody and StateFlow interface. The fifth chapter contains all the simulation results with the relative analysis. Then, in the last section the possible future developments and the conclusion of the work were indicated.