Design And Control Of An Exoskeleton Robot For Upper Limbs Using Twisted String Actuator

Stroke, or cerebrovascular accident (CVA), is one of the major causes of physical impairment inwhich the brain loses its functionality due to a disturbance in blood supply, and can cause permanentneurological damage, complications, and death. As a result, the affected area of the brain does notfunction properly anymore, which might result in an inability to move one or more limbs on one sideof the body as well as difficulties in cognition and sensing, inability to understand or formulatespeech, or an inability to see one side of the visual field. In this paper a novel twist string actuatorand Microsoft Kinect somatosensory sensor were adopted to design an exoskeleton rehabilitationrobot for stroke patients’ upper limb that can help stroke patiens to do rehabilitation exercise. Newtechnologies facilitate designing new devices which are cheaper and have better performance.Microsoft Kinect Virtual environment were integrated to robots for tracking the trajectory of shouldand elbow joint. Based on the knowledge of the robot, the uncertainties of the twisted sting actuatorare unknown but bounded in certain regions. Hence, in this paper, the adaptive control and the robustcontrol approaches will be combined together and implemented to achieve control objectives.