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The aim of rehabilitation robotic area is to research on the application of robotic devices to therapeutic procedures. The goal is to achieve the best possible motor, cognitive and functional recovery for people with impairments following various diseases. Pneumatic actuators are attractive for robotic rehabilitation applications because they are lightweight, powerful, and compliant, but their control has historically been difficult, limiting their use. This article first reviews the current state-of-art in rehabilitation robotic devices with pneumatic actuation systems reporting main features and control issues of each therapeutic device. Then, a new pneumatic rehabilitation robot for proprioceptive neuromuscular facilitation therapies and for relearning daily living skills: like taking a glass, drinking, and placing object on shelves is described as a case study and compared with the current pneumatic rehabilitation devices.

The paper presents the developing of a new robotic system for the administration of a highly sophisticated therapy to stroke patients. This therapy is able to maximize patient motivation and involvement in the therapy and continuously assess the progress of the recovery from the functional viewpoint. Current robotic rehabilitation systems do not include patient information on the control loop. The main novelty of the presented approach is to close patient in the loop and use multisensory data (such as pulse, skin conductance, skin temperature, position, velocity, etc.) to adaptively and dynamically change complexity of the therapy and real-time displays of a virtual reality system in accordance with specific patient requirements. First, an analysis of subject's physiological responses to different tasks is presented with the objective to select the best candidate of physiological signals to estimate the patient physiological state during the execution of a virtual rehabilitation task. Then, the design of a prototype of multimodal robotic platform is defined and developed to validate the scientific value of the proposed approach.

Purpose -The aim of this paper is to present new robotic structures that can be suitable for inspection, maintenance and dismantling tasks in nuclear facilities. Design/methodology/approach -In the first part, two types of parallel robots capable to climb through structures are presented. The kinematics of the proposed platforms is reviewed, with emphasis on the analysis of the singularities. Next section shows the control architecture and the hardware setup of the developed system. Finally, the prototypes developed are showed and some conclusions are obtained. Findings -The slave robot is a parallel structure with the ability to climb over structures and with a very high load capacity. The master device is a parallel device with special characteristics that makes easier the teleoperation of the parallel slave robot. Originality/value -The paper presents a teleoperation system based on parallel platform with 6 degrees of freedom to overcome the classical difficulties of teleoperation in nuclear facilities.

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The measurement of the milk electrical conductivity (EC) during mechanical milking has been widely studied for mastitis detection on cows because its improving of welfare and animal health, although research about small ruminants is scarce. The aim of this study was to evaluate the performance of three commercial conductimeters to be used during mechanical milking of small ruminant halves, especially Murciano-Granadina goats. The objective of this research was to integrate the probes on the milking unit and to check the suitability of the probe selected. The results presented in this research have guided authors to discard the commercial probes and to establish the requirements of a new probe design that is briefly outlined in the conclusions of this contribution.

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