Neuro-Muscular Engineering
Abed Khorasani; Abbas Erfanian Omidvar
Volume 5, Issue 3 , June 2011, , Pages 245-255
Abstract
During the last decade, functional neuromuscular stimulation (FNS) has been proposed as a potential technique for restoring motor function in paralyzed limbs. A major challenge to restoring a desired functional limb movement through the use of intramuscular stimulation is the development of a robust ...
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During the last decade, functional neuromuscular stimulation (FNS) has been proposed as a potential technique for restoring motor function in paralyzed limbs. A major challenge to restoring a desired functional limb movement through the use of intramuscular stimulation is the development of a robust control strategy for determining the stimulation patterns. A major impediment to stimulating the paralyzed limbs and determining the stimulation pattern has been the highly non-linear, time-varying properties of electrically stimulated muscle, muscle fatigue, large latency and time constant which limit the utility of pre-specified stimulation pattern and open-loop FES control system. In this paper we present a robust strategy for multi-joint control through intramuscular stimulation in which the system parameters are adapted online and the controller requires no offline training phase. The method is based on the combination of sliding mode control with fuzzy logic and neural control. Extensive experiments on three rats are provided to demonstrate the robustness, stability, and tracking accuracy of the proposed method. The results show that the proposed strategy can provide accurate tracking control with fast convergence.
