A Parallel Robot with Torque Monitoring for Brachial Monoparesis Rehabilitation Tasks

Abstract

Robots for rehabilitation tasks require a high degree of safety for the interaction with both the patients and for the operators. In particular, high safety is a stable and intuitive control of the moving elements of the system combined with an external system of sensors able to monitor the position of every aspect of the rehabilitation system (operator, robot, and patient) and overcome in a certain measure all the events that may occur during the robotic rehabilitation procedure. This paper presents the development of an internal torque monitoring system for ASPIRE. This is a parallel robot designed for shoulder rehabilitation, which enables the use of strategies towards developing a HRI (human–robot interaction) system for the therapy. A complete analysis regarding the components of the robotic system is carried out with the purpose of determining the dynamic behavior of the system. Next, the proposed torque monitoring system is developed with respect to the previously obtained data. Several experimental tests are performed using healthy subjects being equipped with a series of biomedical sensors with the purpose of validating the proposed torque monitoring strategy and, at the same time, to satisfy the degree of safety that is requested by the medical procedure.

Dynamic Analysis of a Spherical Parallel Robot Used for Brachial Monoparesis Rehabilitation

“…The laws of variation of the moment necessary to operate the flexion/extension module, as well as the abduction/adduction module, are presented in Figure 14. There is an increase in the motor torque required to operate the modules in this case, as well as a steeper variation, similar to that determined experimentally [43].…”

“…The maximum value of the reaction resulting from the coupling A increases from the value of 274 N to 284 N. It is also found that the presence of friction in the couplings imposes a more dynamic character of the movement, an aspect which is highlighted by the steeper variation of the variation graphs. There is an increase in the motor torque required to operate the modules in this case, as well as a steeper variation, similar to that determined experimentally [43].…”

“…The results obtained by numerical simulation in ADAMS must also be validated by those obtained experimentally. Thus, in Figure 24, the results obtained experimentally for the actuation moments of the ASPIRE robot modules have been shown [43].…”

“…The kinematic scheme based on which the virtual and the experimental model is built is shown in Figure 1 [43]. As shown in the kinematic diagram, the ASPIRE robot is composed of two modules.…”

Using a Development Platform with an STM32 Processor to Prototype an Inexpensive 4-DoF Delta Parallel Robot

“…Manipulators and parallel robots are more widely applied in industry. Devices of closed kinematic structure perform much better in many applications than typical industrial robots of serial kinematics [ 9 , 10 ]. Robots with closed kinematic chain are characterized by large rigidity, better positioning repeatability, and manipulation precision [ 6 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 ].…”