Adaptive control with a fuzzy tuner for cable-based rehabilitation robot

Since there are external uncertainties in the environment and the dynamic properties of human arm are time-varying during movement, it is difficult to achieve good tracking performance during robot-aided rehabilitation. The purpose of this study is to develop an adaptive controller with a fuzzy tuner for a cable-based rehabilitation robot. The fuzzy tuner can adjust the control parameters according to position error and the change of error, thus the time-varying control parameters can be optimized by this tuner. To verify the proposed controller, simulation and experiment studies using the cable-based rehabilitation robot are carried out. The rehabilitation robot is employed to complete two facilitation movements in the experiment. Results show that the adaptive controller can attain better control performance after tuning the control parameters.