Development of an Ankle Robot MKA-III for Rehabilitation Training

With the developments of robotics, it has become a fashion trend that ankle rehabilitation robots assist traditional training in rehabilitation field. In this thesis, a novel ankle robot combing with 3 degrees of freedom, combining passive-active training, subjective awareness and objective training was proposed. Prior to robot developments, the requirement of ankle robot was analyzed based on the ankle structure and rehabilitation. In order to acquire the range of ankle motion, an experiment was established to detect the physiological data. Based on traditional rehabilitation therapy, a novel robot-assist rehabilitation therapy combing subjective awareness and objective training was proposed. Based on the requirements analysis, a novel mechanism structure of cross-circle was proposed to robot movement around ankle center. The mechanical structure includes four parts, adduction/abduction parts, dorsiflexion/plantar flexion parts, inversion/eversion parts and sensing unit. Each part of ankle rehabilitation robot was introduced in detail. By means of stress analysis and strength check, the feasibility of the structure was verified. After the mechanism design, the hardware configuration of control system was built up. Finally, the core control strategy, position control and force control were proposed.