Abstract
As a common athletics injury in orthopedics clinic, ankle injury may affect a person’s daily life and ankle injury rehabilitation has gained increasing interests from the medical and robotic societies. A novel hybrid ankle rehabilitation robot is proposed, which composing of a serial and a parallel part. In order to analyze its kinematic performances, the parallel part of the robot is simplified as a constrained 3-PSP parallel mechanism. A mathematical model for the parallel part of the robot is established based on the screw theory. Then the inverse kinematics is obtained, and the reciprocal twists, Jacobian matrices and the singularity of the robot are analyzed. Finally the workspace of the central point on the moving platform is predicted. The kinematic analyses manifest that the proposed hybrid rehabilitation robot not only can realize three kinds of ankle rehabilitation motions, but also can eliminate singularity with enhanced workspace. The workspace of the central point reveals that the hybrid robot can fully meet the demanded rehabilitation space by comparing with the clinic demands. Our results reveals the characteristic structure of the hybrid rehabilitation robot and its superiority, it offers some basis data for the future enhancement of the device.
Highlights
As one of the most complex joints in human skeleton, the ankle joint plays an important role in maintaining the balance of the body (Snedeker et al 2012)
A similar wearable ankle rehabilitation robotic device was designed by Ren et al (2016) which is suitable for early in-bed rehabilitation
A novel hybrid ankle rehabilitation robot is proposed, which is composed of a serial part and a parallel part
Summary
As one of the most complex joints in human skeleton, the ankle joint plays an important role in maintaining the balance of the body (Snedeker et al 2012). Huang et al (2012) proposed a cable-driven ankle joint rehabilitation robot with three degrees-of-freedom, and the inverse kinematics of the mechanism has been calculated based on the closed-vector quadrilateral method. Han et al (2015) proposed an ankle rehabilitation robot with 3-RUPS/S parallel mechanism topology and developed an inverse kinematics model for the mechanism by using the D-H method. This hybrid ankle rehabilitation robot can achieve three kinds of motions pattern, i.e., plantar/dorsal flexion, inversion/eversion, abduction/ adduction. It can be found that in the past years plenty of efforts have been carried out to analyze the kinematics of 3-PSP parallel mechanisms Among these efforts, the constraint equations, numerical algorithm and the closed-vector quadrilateral method are the most commonly used approaches.
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