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Mechatronic Design of a Synergetic Upper Limb Exoskeletal Robot and Wrench-based Assistive Control

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Abstract

Upper limb exoskeletal rehabilitation robots are required to assist patients’ arms to perform activities of daily living according to their motion intentions. In this paper, we address two questions: how to design an exoskeletal robot which can mechanically reconstruct functional movements using only a few actuators and how to establish wrench-based assistive control. We first show that the mechanism replicating the synergic feature of the human upper limb can be designed in a recursive manner, meaning that the entire robot can be constructed from two basic mechanical units. Next, we illustrate that the assistive control for the synergetic exoskeletal robot can be transformed into an optimization problem and a Riemannian metric is proposed to generate anthropomorphic reaching movements according to contact forces and torques. Finally, experiments are carried out to verify the functionality of the proposed theory.

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Acknowledgment

This work was partially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 91648203 and 51335004), the International Science & Technology Cooperation Program of China (Grant No. 2016YFE0113600), and the Science Foundation for Innovative Group of Hubei Province (Grant No. 2015CFA004).

The authors would like to thank Ting Wang, Xiaowei Cheng, and Xuan Wu for their contributions to the development of the experimental platform.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Mechanical Science and Engineering, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, 430074, China

    Lei He, Caihua Xiong, Kai Liu, Chang He & Wenbin Chen

  2. School of Automation, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, 430074, China

    Jian Huang

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  1. Lei He
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  2. Caihua Xiong
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  3. Kai Liu
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  4. Jian Huang
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  5. Chang He
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Correspondence to Caihua Xiong.

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He, L., Xiong, C., Liu, K. et al. Mechatronic Design of a Synergetic Upper Limb Exoskeletal Robot and Wrench-based Assistive Control. J Bionic Eng 15, 247–259 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42235-018-0019-7

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