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Robotic exoskeletons with different actuators have been extensively investigated for decades, but designing a robot joint with compact structure, sufficient output torque, and satisfactory kinematic performance still remains a challenge. The paper introduces the mechanical design and control scheme of a novel joint with a circular rotary electro-hydraulic actuator in order to provide walking assistance for the hip joint. First, measurement and analysis techniques are applied in the gait recognition to determine an accurate swing range of the target joint and provide essential information for the structure design of the hydraulic rotary drive joint. Secondly, the functional structure and working principle of the hydraulic rotary joint are described in detail and the corresponding mathematical model is established for the valve-controlled hydraulic servo system. In addition, an adaptive sliding mode control (ASMC) method is proposed for position-tracking and improving the anti-disturbance ability of the controlled system. The global asymptotic stability and finite-time convergence of the closed-loop system are proved by Lyapunov stability theory. Finally, the feasibility and position-tracking performance of the designed ASMC controller were experimentally verified. Compared to the PID controller and the conventional sliding mode control scheme, the proposed controller improved the position-tracking control accuracy by 20%.

In order to ensure the stable operation of the wall-climbing robot on the ship's complex curved wall surface, analysis and optimisation method of non-contact permanent magnet adsorption unit is discussed in this paper. The influence of magnet arrangement, coupling, air gap distance and other factors on the adsorption force is analysed by finite element simulation software, and the parameter magnet-to-mass ratio is introduced to quantitatively compare these schemes. In the two scenarios of planar wall and curvature-varying wall, the structural parameters of the Halbach array are optimised with the maximum magnetic-to-mass ratio as the optimisation objective, and the ratio of adsorption force variation is proposed as the reference of design to ensure the performance of the adsorption unit on the variable-curvature wall. The running stability of the wall-climbing robot with designed magnetic adsorption unit is verified by experiments on the wall with varying curvature.

Repetitive control (RC) can be used to design active vibration isolation mounts that aim to cancel the influence of spacecraft vibrations on fine pointing equipment. It can cancel the influence of slight imbalance in momentum wheels, reaction wheels, and CMGs. Because RC aims for zero error, it requires reasonably accurate knowledge of the system dynamics all the way to Nyquist frequency. As a result, special methods are needed to establish robustness to model error. A series of publications have demonstrated a method of averaging a cost function over models to increase the robustness. A previous paper improves on this by adjusting the learning rate as a function of frequency to further improve robustness, but there is still a hard limit on phase error. This paper considers yet one more approach, and all three can be used simultaneously. Here we compromise on the zero tracking error requirement for frequencies that require extra robustness. This allows one to extend this hard limit making RC tolerate larger model errors. A quadratic cost is used that penalizes not just the rate of change of the input function, but also the size of the input function. We first establish how to do this for the sister field of iterative learning control, and then the frequency response characteristics are produced for design of repetitive control. The method can improve tracking error for a frequency interval above the frequency at which one would otherwise have to cut off the learning because of model error. Model uncertainty can be used directly in the design process to produce stable RC laws for any level of uncertainty. The design approach differs from typical earlier work that used a sharp frequency cutoff, and instead uses a minimal amount of attenuation needed to produce stability.