Design and Control of RUPERT: A Device for Robotic Upper Extremity Repetitive Therapy

Abstract

The structural design, control system, and integrated biofeedback for a wearable exoskeletal robot for upper extremity stroke rehabilitation are presented. Assisted with clinical evaluation, designers, engineers, and scientists have built a device for robotic assisted upper extremity repetitive therapy (RUPERT). Intense, repetitive physical rehabilitation has been shown to be beneficial overcoming upper extremity deficits, but the therapy is labor intensive and expensive and difficult to evaluate quantitatively and objectively. The RUPERT is developed to provide a low cost, safe and easy-to-use, robotic-device to assist the patient and therapist to achieve more systematic therapy at home or in the clinic. The RUPERT has four actuated degrees-of-freedom driven by compliant and safe pneumatic muscles (PMs) on the shoulder, elbow, and wrist. They are programmed to actuate the device to extend the arm and move the arm in 3-D space. It is very important to note that gravity is not compensated and the daily tasks are practiced in a natural setting. Because the device is wearable and lightweight to increase portability, it can be worn standing or sitting providing therapy tasks that better mimic activities of daily living. The sensors feed back position and force information for quantitative evaluation of task performance. The device can also provide real-time, objective assessment of functional improvement. We have tested the device on stroke survivors performing two critical activities of daily living (ADL): reaching out and self feeding. The future improvement of the device involves increased degrees-of-freedom and interactive control to adapt to a user's physical conditions.

RiceWrist Robotic Device for Upper Limb Training: Feasibility Study and Case Report of Two Tetraplegic Persons with Spinal Cord Injury

“…However, end-effector robots do not possess the ability to control specific jo ints. Exoskeletons such as RiceWrist, Rupert [25], A RM in [26] and CADEN-7 [27] are designed to resemb le hu man anatomy and their structure enables individual actuation of jo ints. RiceWrist and other exosketons offer the advantage of precisely recording and monitoring isolated joint movements as depicted by recorded measures of smoothness collected for wrist extension, radial deviation, and forearm supination in the current study (Figures 4 and 5).…”

A Context-Aware Application to Increase Elderly Users Compliance with Physical Rehabilitation Exercises at Home via Animatronic Biofeedback

“…A biomechatronic device named RUPERT has been presented by Sugar et al [20], as a way to provide an easy-touse assistance to enable the patient and therapist to achieve more systematic therapy at home or at the clinic. This device has been designed as a wearable robot for upper extremity physical rehabilitation using biofeedback in stroke patients.…”

Fuzzy PD-Type Iterative Learning Control of a Single Pneumatic Muscle Actuator

“…Then, they designed a 2-DOF PMA-driven parallel robot and proposed a P-type ILC with leading phase compensation to iteratively compensate the uncertainties of remaining model, which makes the desired trajectories for the endeffector position to be tracked with high accuracy [11]. Balasubramanian et al designed a 4-DOF upper limb repetitive therapy wearable robot named "RUPERT" driven by PMA, using for the shoulder, elbow and wrist rehabilitation training [12]. On the basis of RUPERT, the adaptive control strategy was designed.…”