Reachability Analysis for Robustness Evaluation of the Sit-to-Stand Movement for Powered Lower Limb Orthoses

A sensitivity-based approach for computing over-approximations of reachable sets, in the presence of constant parameter uncertainty and a single initial state, is used to analyze a three-link planar robot modeling a Powered Lower Limb Orthosis and its user. Given the nature of the mappings relating the state and parameters of the system with the input, and output describing the trajectories of its Center of Mass, reachable sets for their respective spaces can be obtained relying on the sensitivities of the nonlinear closed-loop dynamics in the state space. These over-approximations are used to evaluate the worst-case performances of a finite time horizon linear-quadratic regulator for controlling the ascending phase of the Sit-To-Stand movement.