Study On Mechanism Design And Control Method Of A Personalized Wearable Robotic Arm

With the global aging trend,elderly’s needs for the limbs power assistance in their daily life,and stroke patients for the body rehabilitation training become more and more intense.Wearable exoskeleton robots have great potential to meet the above requirements.Traditional wearable rehabilitation robots are large,heavy,in high cost and with limited quantity,mostly used in public environments such as hospitals or rehabilitation institutions.Therefore,they hardly meet the growing needs of the aging society.In this paper we aim to develop a portable upper limb power assistance robot which is personalized,lightweight and comfortable and capable of being used in the families.The study includes the mechanism design,prototype and control system construction,experimental verification of a five degrees of freedom wearable robot arm,i WArm.The main research contents are as follows:By investigating the motion function and anatomical structure of human arms,the mechanism scheme of the 5-DOF wearable robotic arm i WArm was proposed.the driving scheme of digital motor combined with wire transmission was proposed.The joint structure and wire transmission route design of the shoulder,elbow and wrist joints were completed.A wearable structure based on the contour of human arm was designed using3 D scanning technology.The key parts were manufactured using 3D printing technology.the i WArm prototype was completed.The kinematics model of the wearable robotic arm was established.and the forward and inverse solutions of the kinematics model,Jacobian matrix and manipulator workspace were solved.In order to solve the problem of motion trajectory planning of 5-DOF robotic arm,two trajectory planning methods of workspace virtual bar and Kinectbased human motion capture were proposed.The control system scheme of i WArm was designed.The hardwares of the experimental platform were selected.The lower control algorithm and the real-time monitoring software of the upper computer were programmed.Two trajectory following experiments of cablear push and pull motion and flat circle motion were conducted.The experiment results show that the i WArm prototype has good motion stability and position following.The lifting and feeding motions were carried out as i WArm is weared on a examinee.The experimental results show that the i WArm robotic arm can well cooperate with the human arm movement.comparatively analysing the EMG signals of the examinee’s arm proves that the robotic arm has the power assistance effect.