Structure Design And Characteristic Evaluation Of An Exoskeleton Upper Limb Rehabilitation Robot

Cerebral apoplexy is also called stroke,stroke is also considered one of the three major killers of human health.More than fifty percent of the normal activities of the limb hemiplegic cannot be achieved after the stroke,there is a large number of stroke among the middle aged and old people.With the aging of society becoming more and more serious,the health problem of middle-aged and elderly people is widely concerned by the entire world.Therefore,the rehabilitation of upper limb movement has become focus of attention for stroke patients.With the development of society and the rapid progress of science and technology,robotic technology has been applied to the field of upper limb rehabilitation training.At present,the research of upper limb rehabilitation robot at our country and abroad has achieved great achievement,but there are still some problems such as complicated structure,inconvenient carrying,low integration degree,etc.In this paper,a portable exoskeleton upper limb rehabilitation robot and its control system are proposed to help stroke patients with rehabilitation training.When designed,the robot was according to the structural characteristics of human upper limbs,and the robot was also designed according to the human engineering principle.The new design of the upper limb rehabilitation robot had sixteen degrees of freedom,which can be conveniently worn on the upper limbs of the patients,and the robot has high degree of integration.The robot can help patients achieve rehabilitation training of elbow flexion/extension,wrist inner/external rotation and five fingers flexion/extension.In order to verify the rationality and reliability of the robot structure,the virtual prototyping technology was applied to simulate the kinematics of the designed upper limb rehabilitation robot model in this paper.From the results of simulation,we can know that the motion compliance of the rehabilitation robot was good,and the simulation operation can be carried out smoothly,and the rationality of the robot structure was proved.The robot used motors as driving mode and motors was considered as power source,which can make more precise position control for robot,and enable robot to arrive at the specified angle of control system accurately.In the design of control system,two kinds of control mode--the program control and the master-slave control were realized combined with LabVIEW.The rehabilitation training command button through the PC terminal LabVIEW on control interface were clicked to control the rehabilitation training in the program control system.It was easy to operate and the system was stable.In the master-slave control system,doctors/operators and the Xbox handle controller as the main terminal,the system control circuit,the patient/subject and the rehabilitation robot were considered as the slave end.The Xbox handle operating device was small,which was convenient to carry,and Xbox handle had good combination with the PC Windows operating system,the advantages of the master-slave control system were smooth operation and small delay.In addition,in the master-slave control system,the PC terminal can provide visual feedback--virtual screen of the robot motion,and the doctors/operators can observe the motion of the robot and facilitate the understanding of the state of the patients' rehabilitation training according to visual feedback.In the end,we carried out the performance evaluation experiments on the designed upper limb rehabilitation robot.The characteristic evaluation experiments were mainly used to evaluate the robot's rehabilitation motion characteristics through program control and master-slave experiments.The experimental results showed that the upper limb rehabilitation robot proposed had good real-time performance,and the action of the slave end is basically consistent with the operation of the main end,which proved that the slave end had good follow-up.