Controllability and optimization of multibody systems in human motion rehabilitation

S. Karastanev, P. Kiriazov

Abstract: Motion performance optimisation is needed in various daily life and sport activities, especially for people with movement disorders due to stroke, trauma, or neurological diseases. The important performance indices are motion/posture accuracy, movement execution time, and energy expenditure. Generally speaking, we need to consider complicated optimisation problems for complex neuro-musculo-skeletal systems. In order to achieve such performance optimization, it is very important to study the controllability of those systems and their design criteria. Explicit, necessary and sufficient conditions have been found to guarantee stability robustness of the individual joint controllers. Thus the control design can be based on optimal trade-off relationships between the bounds of disturbances and the control force limits. These and other reasonable design criteria will be considered in this paper and the design concepts will be illustrated with several examples. We will give two important examples to explain the basic features of our approach: arm reaching task and steps performing task.

Keywords: controllability; design and performance optimisation; Multibody system dynamics

Date published: 2013-12-09