DEVELOPMENT AND ANALYSIS OF A BILATERAL END-EFFECTER UPPER LIMB REHABILITATION ROBOT

Studies have shown that rehabilitation training with the unaffected side guiding affected side is more consistent with the natural movement pattern of human upper limb compared with unilateral rehabilitation training, which is conducive to improve rehabilitation effect of the affected limb motor function. In this paper, a bilateral end-effector upper limb rehabilitation robot (BEULRR) based on two modern commercial manipulators is developed first, then the kinematics, reachability, and dexterity analysis of BEULRR are performed, respectively. Finally, a bilateral symmetric training protocol with the unaffected side guiding the affected side is proposed and evaluated through healthy human subject experiment testing based on BEULRR. The simulation results show that the developed BEULRR could perform spatial rehabilitation training and its rehabilitation training workspace can fully cover the physiological workspace of human upper limb. The preliminary experiment results from the healthy human subject show that the BEULRR system could provide reliable bilateral symmetric training protocol. These simulation and experiment results demonstrated that the developed BEULRR system could be used in bilateral rehabilitation training application, and also show that the BEULRR system has the potential to be applied to clinical rehabilitation training in the further step. In the close future, the proposed BEULRR and bilateral symmetric training protocol are planned to be applied in elderly volunteers and patients with upper limb motor dysfunction for further evaluating.