Design and Control of a Wearable Hand Rehabilitation Robot

Abstract

This paper proposes a wearable hand rehabilitation robot for assisting patients to do rehabilitation training such as the flexion and extension of fingers. This robot prototype has a modularized structure with nine degrees of freedom for the independent control of the patient's fingers. To alleviate the weight applied on the patient's hand and arm, the entire control system is placed in the patient's backpack and the cable-driven approach is employed to achieve the long-distance power transmission. Because of the repetitive training manner and the existence of external disturbances, a controller combining the iterative learning control (ILC) and the active disturbance rejection control (ADRC) has been proposed for the control of the finger's joints. The contributions of this paper lie in the robot's modularized structure design and the proposed ``ILC + ADRC”controller. Experimental results have verified the function of the proposed robot and demonstrated the satisfactory control performance achieved by the proposed controller.