Lightweight Electrohydrostatic Actuator Drive Solution for Exoskeleton Robots

The practical long-term application of power-assisted exoskeleton robots requires lightweight, high-efficient, and high-control precision actuators. Based on the improvement of hardware design and control method, this article proposes a complete drive solution for the joint drive of exoskeleton robots and promotes the research of robot joint drive based on the pump-controlled hydraulic system. Specifically, a compact, backdrivable, and energy-efficient drive unit, lightweight electrohydrostatic actuator (LEHA) with a weight of 2.5 kg and a rated power of 340 W is designed first. Then, by combining the fifth-order high-precision dynamics model of LEHA and virtual decomposition control method, a high-performance controller with $L_{2}$ and $L_{\infty }$ stability is developed to realize the precise position trajectory tracking control of LEHA. Experimental results based on actual exoskeleton robot knee joints show that the proposed solution has high trajectory tracking performance over the frequency range of human body swing phase motion (0.5–1.5 Hz) and different loads (0–20 kg). Moreover, compared with the valve-controlled hydraulic power system with the same exoskeleton robot knee joint and wearer, test results show that the average efficiency increased by 18.13% after using LEHA under the swing phase test.