Design of a New Wrist Rehabilitation Robot Based on Soft Fluidic Muscle

Abstract

This paper presents the design of a new type of soft robot for wrist rehabilitation. The robot adopts six pneumatic fluidic muscles as flexible material-based actuators, which are evenly connected in parallel. The length control of the six actuators is realized via the regulation of air pressure, which enables the bending control of a wrist handle by internal and external rotation action. A larger bending angle of the handle is obtained by applying a larger air pressure. In addition, a stepper motor is used to drive the overall structure to achieve the stretching movement of the wrist. The proposed three-degree-of-freedom wrist rehabilitation robot can drive the human wrist to bend, rotate, and stretch for rehabilitation. The designed rehabilitation robot is compact, flexible, safe and highly practical. It is suitable for recovering the patients with wrist rehabilitation.