An articulated rehabilitation robot for upper limb physiotherapy and training

Abstract

The objective of this study is to design a robot system to assist the rehabilitation of patients so that they can afterwards do various daily activities. It is difficult to determine the desirable posture of a 9-DOFs exoskeleton manipulator in such a system and each joint control design as well. In this paper, we resolve the difficulties by mapping the kinematics of a human arm to that of the manipulator so that we can avoid going through the ill-postured configurations while searching for the desired solutions, and then reach the desired rehabilitation motion as precisely as possible. In addition, this study combines electromyography (EMG) and force sensor to detect the patient's motion on his/her volition, so that the rehab-robot can support the human's upper limb appropriately to fulfill the intended motion. For validation of our rehab-robot design, experiments are conducted and promising results are obtained.