Design And Control Of Hand Tremor Suppression For Meal Assistance Robot

Tremor especially the pathological tremor such as essential tremor(ET)and Parkinson disease(PD)associated with human body movement,is a common neurological disease.Although the tremor didn't endanger lives,it could bring many lives inconvenience for many patients.Seriously it could result in patients losing the self-care ability,such as feeding themselves.Currently medication is the key approach to treat it.But the effect of the medications is not satisfactory and has side effects.So in recent years,the domestic and foreign researchers attempt to develop the device for tremor suppression by the non-drug approach using robot technology.These devices have been designed to help the patients with limb tremor to overcome the tremor and restore mobility and have been preliminarily accepted by medical profession and patients.In the thesis a kind of meal assistance robot based on hand tremor suppression was developed using the man-machine combination technology.The robots are aimed to help the patients who cannot feed themselves due to hand tremor to eat by themselves and to improve the quality of their lives.The meal assistance robot based on tremor suppression mainly used the real-time movement intention signal that was improved by the filter to control the rotation of motor in each joint.Therefore the movement of the spoon was controlled to realize the aim of the meal assistance based on tremor suppression.The movement signal of human hand usually is the coupling of movement intention signal and tremor signal.The modeling of tremor signal is very difficult due to the randomness of tremor signal.In this thesis,the movement intention signal and tremor signal were separated by filter based on the frequency band difference of the two kinds of signals.The traditional filter has a delay and cannot meet the requirement of real-time.So based on the feature that the human tremor signals remains approximately sine wave,the self-adapting filter combining the predicting tremor algorithm and filter was designed to separate the movement intention signal and the tremor signal.The separated movement intention signal was used as the controlling signal,which controlled the spoon at the end to move at different velocity according to the intended path by controlling the rotation of each motor.In the thesis the mechanical structure of meal assistance robot for tremor suppression was designed.Based on the analysis of tremor feature,the separation of limb signals was realized.The meal was finished by the controlling the motor using the movement intention signal.