RUPERT: An exoskeleton robot for assisting rehabilitation of arm functions

Abstract

The design of a wearable upper extremity therapy robot RUPERT IV™ (Robotic Upper Extremity Repetitive Trainer) device is presented. It is designed to assist in repetitive therapy tasks related to activities of daily living which has been advocated for being more effective for functional recovery. RUPERT™ has five actuated degrees of freedom driven by compliant and safe pneumatic muscle actuators (PMA) assisting shoulder elevation, humeral external rotation, elbow extension, forearm supination and wrist/hand extension. The device is designed to extend the arm and move in a 3D space with no gravity compensation, which is a natural setting for practicing day-to-day activities. Because the device is wearable and lightweight, the device is very portable; it can be worn standing or sitting for performing therapy tasks that better mimic activities of daily living. A closed-loop controller combining a PID-based feedback controller and a Iterative learning controller (ILC)-based feedforward controller is proposed for RUPERT for passive repetitive task training. This type of control aids in overcoming the highly nonlinear nature of the plant under control, and also helps in adapting easily to different subjects for performing different tasks. The system was tested on two able-bodied subjects to evaluate its performance.