Design And Study Of A Wearable Upper Limb Exoskeleton

The traditional rehabilitation therapy for stroke relies a great deal on manual assistance of therapists,and has a bunch of shortcomings,thus inhibiting its wide application.Therefore,rehabilitation robots have become a hot research topic during recent years.However,there are some deficiencies in the existing rehabilitation robots,such as not suitable for wearing and not compact.This work developed a wearable multi-joint rehabilitation exoskeleton system for upper limb.In this paper,upper limb rehabilitation robots have been carefully investigated firstly.Based on the reported physiological structure of mankind upper limb,a new design of the upper limb exoskeleton system is presented,which integrates the soft exoskeleton and rigid exoskeleton.The system can be divided into two parts: soft robotic rehabilitation glove and the arm exoskeleton system.The main system consists of the hand exoskeleton,the elbow exoskeleton,and the shoulder exoskeleton,which has a total of eight degrees of freedom.It utilized tendon-sheath mechanism which separated motor and actuator in order to make the exoskeleton part attached to human body as compact as possible.The idea of modular design was applied to facilitate flexible applications of varying demands in different situations.Dynamic analysis was then carried out on the devised soft robotic glove.By using the D-H method,the kinematics model of the arm exoskeleton system was established and the forward and inverse kinematics analysis was carried out.The workspace cloud of arm exoskeleton was calculated.Then the hardware and software of this system ware designed,and two kinds of rehabilitation modes(active mode and passive mode)were realized.Finally,the performance of the soft robotic glove was evaluated in experiments,and the trajectory tracking ability of arm exoskeleton system was tested.The feasibility of this whole upper limb exoskeleton system was verified.The research results of this paper provided a new idea for the design of rehabilitation robot,which has a promising role in promoting the development of family rehabilitation training.