Mechanism Design and ADAMS-MATLAB-Simulation of a Novel Ankle Rehabilitation Robot

Abstract

As the population continues to grow, stroke has become one of the major diseases that threaten the health of the elderly people. As a product of combination of medicine and Engineering, the ankle rehabilitation robot can assist ankle joints patients with rehabilitation training and has a good prospect of application. This paper presents an ankle rehabilitation robot for hemiplegic patients. Firstly, the physiological structure of human ankle joint is introduced and the design requirements of robot are put forward. Then the three components of the robot mechanism (the internal/external rotation mechanism, the dorsiflexion/plantarflexion mechanism, the inversion/eversion mechanism) are described in detail and the motion range of each joint is analyzed. The dynamics model in ADAMS and the control model in Simulink of the novel ankle rehabilitation robot are built based on the mechanism model. Based on the ADAMS and MATLAB co-simulation technology, dynamics analysis and control analysis of the ankle rehabilitation robot are carried out. Compared with experimental data, the simulation results show the feasibility of the mechanism design and control scheme. The difficulties and practicability of the co-simulation technology in the ankle rehabilitation robot are further discussed.