Development of a Rehabilitation Robot: Modeling and Trajectory Tracking Control

Abstract

Recently, assistive robots have attracted great attention from researchers in the rehabilitation field. These types of robots support patients to perform designated movements during a training process. Despite the existence of commercial rehabilitation systems, growing demands for improvement in both hardware and control design are evident. Therefore, this paper introduces a prototype pneumatic artificial muscle-based assistive robot named BK-Gait and its control strategy for trajectory tracking purposes. Firstly, a brief description of the robot mechanism is presented. Secondly, the mathematical model of the robot’s actuator is built. Third, an active disturbance rejection control (ADRC) strategy is developed to enhance the tracking performance of the robot. Finally, multi scenarios experiments are carried out to evaluate the applicability of the robot and the proposed controller in the rehabilitation field.

Neural network based patient recovery estimation of a PAM-based rehabilitation robot

“…As an alternative, the pneumatic artificial muscle (PAM) system has been proposed due to its advantages, including a large power/weight ratio, low cost, lightweight, and similar characteristics to human muscles, as reported in recent studies [3][4][5][6][7][8]. For this reason, a many PAMbased gait training systems have been developed in the literature [8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16] that can assist the patient with movement according to the exercises prescribed by the physiotherapist.…”