Development of a 3 freedom ankle robot to assist the rehabilitation training

With the developments of robotics, more and more rehabilitation robots are used to assist traditional training in rehabilitation field. In this paper, a novel ankle robot combined with 3 degrees of freedom, full fill passive-active training, subjective awareness and objective training requirements was proposed. The requirement of ankle robot was analyzed based on the ankle physical structure and real rehabilitation. Based on traditional rehabilitation therapy, a novel robot-assist rehabilitation therapy to combine subjective awareness with objective training was proposed. In this robot, a novel mechanism structure of cross-circle was proposed to robot movement around ankle center. The mechanical structure includes four parts, adduction/abduction parts, dorsiflexion/plantar flexion parts, inversion/eversion parts and sensing unit. Each part of ankle rehabilitation robot was introduced in detail. Finally, the core control strategy, position control and force control were proposed. With the robot, several primary experiments are performed. The feasibility of the robot was verified.