Position control using adaptive backlash compensation for bowden cable transmission in soft wearable exoskeleton

In recent years, bowden-cable transmissions have been developed and utilized widely in many robotic applications due to advantages in durability, lightweight, safety, and flexibility. Especially, over the last decade, a substantial number of soft wearable exoskeletons using bowden cables for motion transmission have been designed for human assistance, empowerment and rehabilitation. The major advantage of soft assistive devices driven by bowden-cable transmissions is to allow decentralizing the actuation stages proximally such that their mass has the least effect on the end-effector. Besides the advantage, the main drawback of the bowden cabledriven system comes from the presence of nonlinearities such as friction and backlash hysteresis that affects their control accuracy. Hence, in this paper, we introduce a mathematical model for backlash hysteresis and propose a solution based on the nonlinear adaptive control to compensate for the backlash effect. The backlash hysteresis model and control scheme are validated first on a custom-designed test bench and then applied to control a soft exoskeleton in a preliminary human trial.