Design And Experiments On A Soft Robotic Glove For The Hand Rehabilitation

Stroke is one of the three major killers that seriously endanger human health.It can easily cause patients with hemiplegia,which greatly reduces the quality of life of patients.To solve this problem,researchers have applied robotics to the field of rehabilitation to help people with rehabilitation training.However,most of the existing rehabilitation training robots are rigid mechanisms which exists some problems of complex structures,poor portability,low safety,and high costs.But the application of soft robotic technologies can solve a series of problems of rigid robots.In order to solve the current problems of rehabilitation robots,such as the complex structures and poor portabilities.A soft robotic glove for hand rehabilitation is proposed in this paper.The device has the advantages of high flexibility,light weight,and high safety.It can be used to assist patients in hand flexion and extension,grasping and other aspects.The specific research contents of this paper are as follows:Firstly,the structure and bending principle of the existing soft actuators have been researched,and a soft actuator with variable stiffness is designed.The core idea of the actuator is as follows: In this soft actuator,the corresponding material stiffness at the finger joint is lower than the corresponding material stiffness at the finger knuckle position to ensure that the bending curvature of the finger joint position is far greater than the knuckle position when the actuator is bent.Secondly,by analyzing the biological characteristics and kinematics of human hand bones,a structural model of finger bending motion was established,and the maximum motion range of finger bending was obtained.By establishing the spatial equation of the curved trajectory of the fingertip of a finger,the image of the spatial equation using MATLAB is analyzed,and the moving trails of the fingertips of the fingers are obtained.The parameters of the soft actuator are explained in detail.Once again,the structure model of actuator is built by using the software of Solid Works.The mathematical modeling is used to analyze the bending angles of actuator and changes of pressure during the pressurization process of actuator,the mathematical relationship between the two is obtained.The ABAQUS finite element analysis software was used to simulate the bending deformation of the model under pressure,and the relationship between the pressures and the bending angles of actuator is researched.Through comparative analysis of mathematical modeling results and finite element simulation results,the reliability of the model of the actuator is verified.Next,the preparation processes and fabrication of the soft actuator are mainly introduced.The soft actuator is a soft,square silicon body with a cavity inside.It has the characteristics of pressure bending and pressure loss,and the original pressure is restored.The 3D printing technology and silicone casting technology are mainly used in the fabrication of soft actuators.At the same time,an experimental platform is set up to test the performance of the soft actuator.The tensile length experiment and the driver bending angle experiment are done in this research.Finally,the manufacturing process of soft robotic glove is introduced in detail in this paper.The device is composed of soft materials,and it is mainly composed of soft actuator and fabric glove.At the same time,the pneumatic control device is used in this research is introduced,the experimental platform is set up and the device is worn for grasping experiments and tensile experiments of the device during the grasping process.