Mechanical design of a portable knee-ankle-foot robot

Abstract

We are developing an intelligent compact and modular knee-ankle-foot robot gait rehabilitation at outpatient and home settings. The robot is designed with a novel compact compliant force controllable actuator. We adopt a modular design for the knee and ankle joint so that the robot can assist patients with different conditions of gait impairments. The light-weight anthropomorphic structure designed based on biomechanical studies is built with advanced composite materials to achieve portability. A prototype of the robot has been built for testing. In this paper, we present the mechanical design of the robot with focus on the actuator and mechanism design and analysis, with testing results to demonstrate the performance of the actuator.