Exoskeletons are wearable devices designed to assist humans according to their needs. Their applications can be found in rehabilitation, assistance and power augmentation. For assistive powered exoskeletons human motion intention detection is an important element for implementing assistive control strategies. While many methods of motion detection have been developed, however, there still exists many challenges i.e. high robustness, convenience, data repeatability and applicability for implementation on assistive powered exoskeletons. Therefore, new methods that can fulfill these requirements are needed.The aim of this thesis is to develop novel methods of motion intention detection for control of exoskeletons. The focus of this thesis is to analyze the performance of force myography (FMG) to detect upper limb movements and based on it develop control methods for upper limb assistive exoskeletons.In this thesis performance of FMG is analyzed by comparing it with sEMG. Motion detection accuracy and data repeatability were compared for detecting forearm motions i.e. forearm flexion, extension, pronation, supination and rest. The study showed the feasibility of FMG when implemented for assistive powered exoskeleton control.Exoskeleton control with FMG is another focus of this thesis. FMG is first used to control a soft exoskeleton by detecting dynamic hand gestures i.e. rest, opening, closing and grasping. This study addressed the challenges associated with object grasping task i.e. amount of training data, robust detection and assistance level determination. The influence of sensor placement on detection performance was also experimentally analyzed.Finally, FMG based control method for upper limb exoskeleton, i.e. elbow and shoulder joint, is presented in this thesis. A machine learning based algorithm is developed for determining assistance level during object carrying tasks by estimating the carried payload. The performance of the method is analyzed by testing on healthy subjects. Whereas, the results of physical assistance are verified by comparing the results of load carrying tasks with and without exoskeleton.This thesis contributes to the state-of-the-art of upper limb motion iniii tention detection using FMG. Studies verify that FMG, being accurate and a convenient method to interpret motion intention, has great potential for application of assistive exoskeletons. A contribution of this thesis is performance analysis of muscle activity detection methods that compares FMG and sEMG in terms of accuracy/repeatability. Another contribution is the novel methods for grasping and load carrying. The proposed techniques are able to reduce system complexity for convenient and robust use in actual environment.