A Tendon-driven Upper-limb Rehabilitation Robot

Abstract

Rehabilitation robots are playing an increasingly important role in daily rehabilitation of patients. In recent years, exoskeleton rehabilitation robots have become a research hotspot. However, the existing exoskeleton rehabilitation robots are mainly rigid exoskeletons. During rehabilitation training using such exoskeletons, the patient's joint rotation center is fixed, which cannot adapt to the actual joint movements, resulting in secondary damage to the patients. Therefore, in this paper, a tendon-driven flexible upper-limb rehabilitation robot is proposed; the structure and connectors of the rehabilitation robot are designed considering the physiological structure of human upper limbs; we also built the prototype and performed experiments to validate the designed robot. The experimental results show that the proposed upper-limb rehabilitation robot can assist the human subject to conduct upper-limb rehabilitation training.