The Adaptive Control of FES-assisted Indoor Rowing Exercise

This paper describes the development of an adaptive control mechanism for FES-assisted indoor rowing exercise (FES-rowing). The FES-rowing is intro-duced as a total body exercise for rehabilitation of function of lower body through the application of functional elec-trical stimulation (FES). A model of the rowing ergometer with humanoid is developed using the visual Nastran soft-ware environment (vN4D). A fuzzy logic control (FLC) scheme is designed in Matlab/Simulink and adapted online by pre-training artificial neural network (ANN) to regulate the muscle stimulation pulse width required to drive FES-rowing. The ANN is used as an adaptation to the system that is required to account for muscle fatigue. The results signify that the adaptive control scheme is able to achieve and maintain better tracking performance. This study indicates that the adaptive control developed may provide an effective mechanism for automatically regulat-ing the stimulation pulse width for FES-rowing to over-come muscle fatigue.