# University of Twente Student Theses

## Control of exoskeleton using synergy-driven neuromusculoskeletal modelling

Pakkirisamy, P.K. (2020) Control of exoskeleton using synergy-driven neuromusculoskeletal modelling.

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 Abstract: Mimicking nature has always helped mankind gather ideas to solve problems. One such problem is the issue of providing assistance to spinal cord injury patients. To solve this problem, the muscle excitation profiles (MEPs) are used. MEPs represent the muscle excitations which in turn can be provided to an accurate neuromusculoskeletal model to obtain the reference torque profiles. For generation of continuous torque profiles, the MEPs needs to be generated as a function of the user's gait phase which leads to the necessity of an accurate gait phase estimator. Thus, we developed an adaptive oscillator based gait phase estimation to generate muscle excitation primitives in real-time as a function of phase. The evaluation of this gait phase estimation methodology was done by comparing with gold standard gait phase estimation method (\textit{i.e.} using ground reaction forces). Finally, the correlation of the muscle excitation profiles and EMG signals was performed to validate real-time MEPs generation and a overall correlation coefficient greater than 0.63 $\pm$ 0.19 was found. This signifies that this research can be further extended to control an exoskeleton by using MEPs along with an accurate neuromusculoskeletal model to generate reference torque profiles for the exoskeleton. Item Type: Essay (Master) Faculty: ET: Engineering Technology Subject: 52 mechanical engineering Programme: Systems and Control MSc (60359) Link to this item: https://purl.utwente.nl/essays/85292 Export this item as: BibTeXEndNoteHTML CitationReference Manager

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