Beiter, Benjamin Christopher2024-05-102024-05-102024-05-09vt_gsexam:39612https://hdl.handle.net/10919/118947Powered exoskeletons have the potential to revolutionize the labor workplace across many disciplines, from manufacturing to agriculture. However, there are still many barriers to adoption and widespread implementation of exoskeletons. One major research gap of powered exoskeletons currently is the development of a control framework to best cooperate with the user. This limitation is first in understanding the physical and cognitive interaction between the user and exoskeleton, and then in designing a controller that addresses this interaction in a way that provides both physical assistance towards completing a task, and a decrease in the cognitive demand of operating the device. This work demonstrates that multi-objective, optimization-based control can be used to provide a coincident implementation of autonomous robot control, and human-input driven control. A parameter called 'acceptance' can be added to the weights of the cost functions to allow for an automatic trade-off in control priority between the user and robot objectives. This is paired with an update function that allows for the exoskeleton control objectives to track the user objectives over time. This results in a cooperative, powered exoskeleton controller that is responsive to user input, dynamically adjusting control autonomy to allow the user to act to complete a task, learn the control objective, and then offload all effort required to complete the task to the autonomous controller. This reduction in effort is physical assistance directly towards completing the task, and should reduce the cognitive load the user experiences when completing the task. To test the hypothesis of whether high task assistance lowers the cognitive load of the user, a study is designed and conducted to test the effect of the shared autonomy controller on the user's experience operating the robot. The user operates the robot under zero-, full-, and shared-autonomy control cases. Physical workload, measured through the force they exert to complete the task, and cognitive workload, measured through pupil dilation, are evaluated to significantly show that high-assistance operation can lower the cognitive load experienced by a user alongside the physical assistance provided. Automatic adjustment in autonomy works to allow this assistance while allowing the user to be responsive to changing objectives and disturbances. The controller does not remove all mental effort from operation, but shows that high acceptance does lead to less mental effort. When implementing this control beyond the simple reaching task used in the study, however, the controller must be able to both track to the user's desired objective and converge to a high-assistance state to lead to the reduction in cognitive load. To achieve this behavior, first is presented a method to design and enforce Lyapunov stability conditions of individual tasks within a multi-objective controller. Then, with an assumption on the form of the input the user will provide to accomplish their intended task, it is shown that the exoskeleton can stably track an acceptance-weighted combination of the user and robot desired objectives. This guarantee of following the proper trajectory at corresponding autonomy levels results in comparable accuracy in tracking a simulated objective as the base shared autonomy approach, but with a much higher acceptance level, indicating a better match between the user and exoskeleton control objectives, as well as a greater decrease in cognitive load. This process of enforcing stability conditions to shape human-exoskeleton system behavior is shown to be applicable to more tasks, and is in preparation for validation with further user studies.ETDenCreative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 InternationalWhole Body ControlPowered ExoskeletonsRoboticsCognitive LoadLyapunov StabilityDissertation