Development of an ankle rehabilitation robot for ankle training

Making use of rehabilitation robot to replace traditional therapist rehabilitation on hemiplegic rehabilitation has been a fashion trend. There are many ankle rehabilitation robots are proposed. However all of them are only focusing on providing a passive training to the patient. In this paper, we will present the frame work on designing a novel ankle robot which combines the active training with passive training together. To get the design basis, an experiment to detect the ankle physiology data is established. Additionally, an ankle rehabilitation robot with three degrees is proposed. This robot embeds force sensors and position sensors to detect the dynamic movements of the ankle. The detail design of the mechanism is introduced. The mechanical structure includes pedal parts, thigh fixing parts, base, driving unit and sensing unit. Comparing with the other ankle rehabilitation robots, this robot uses three blushless motors to direct three rotation motions directly, and the whole structure is simple and reliable. Control system is also introduced in this paper. In order to test the performance of control system, two experiments are established to test the velocity respond and positioning accuracy. Results show that the system has a nice rapidity, stability and accuracy.