Development of a Virtual Reality Simulator for a Lower Limb Rehabilitation Robot

Abstract

The paper describes the design of a virtual reality simulator destined to a robotic system designed for patient's lower limb medical recovery. The VR simulator is created in Unity 5 environment. In this environment was imported the mechanical design of the robotic structure, together with a virtual human model (an avatar) that latter was coupled with the robotic structure. The robotic mechanical structure is designed in the Siemens NX environment, a professional mechatronics design software and the human virtual model was created using the MakeHuman program, an open source 3D computer graphics middleware. In the first step for creating the virtual reality simulator, an enclosure was defined where the robotic structure used to recover the lower limb has been introduced. In the second stage, the human virtual model was loaded into Unity 5 environment and “attached” to the robotic mechanical system. In the last stage was defined a Robotic system User Interface (RUI) for the robotic system control. The RUI was created using C Sharp (C#) programming language that exists within the Visual Studio software package.