Design of Six-Axis Force/Moment Sensor for Ankle-Rehabilitation Robot

Abstract

Most serious patients who have the paralysis of their ankles can't use of their feet freely. But their ankles can be recovered by an ankle bending rehabilitation exercise and a ankle rotating rehabilitation exercise. Recently, the professional rehabilitation therapeutists are much less than stroke patients in number. Therefore, the ankle-rehabilitation robot should be developed. The developed robot can be dangerous because it can't measure the applied bending force and twisting moment of the patients' ankles. In this paper, the six-axis force/moment sensor for the ankle-rehabilitation robot was specially designed the weight of foot and the applied force to foot in rehabilitation exercise. As a test results, the interference error of the six-axis force/moment sensor was less than 2.51%. It is thought that the sensor can be used to measure the bending force and twisting moment of the patients' ankles in rehabilitation exercise.