Kinematics and Dynamics Analysis of a Novel Ankle Rehabilitation Robot

Abstract

As the population continues to grow, stroke has become one of the major diseases that threaten the health of the elderly people. Ankle rehabilitation is an essential part of the recovery. At present, the patient completed the training mainly with the help of a physiotherapist, which not only increases the burden on the physiotherapist but also delays the patient's recovery process. To meet the rehabilitation needs of stroke patients and improve the rehabilitation efficiency, this paper presents a novel ankle rehabilitation robot to mimic the practical skills of the physiotherapist. Based on the designed robot mechanism, the corresponding kinematics is analyzed to obtain the displacement expression of the foot pedal of the ankle joint rehabilitation robot as well as verify the correctness of the robot structure design. Subsequently, the joint actuation torque of the ankle robot in the joint space is calculated based on the second kind of Lagrange's equations in MATLAB, and then, the dynamical model of the ankle robot is performed. Finally, importing the SolidWorks model into the Adams software for a dynamic simulation to obtain the change of the joint driving torque of the rehabilitation robot is achieved. The data of ADAMS simulation is consistent with numerical results in MATLAB. Therefore, the joint calculation method can be used for motor control of the ankle rehabilitation robot.