Bi-Planar Trajectory Tracking with a Novel 3DOF Cable Driven Lower Limb Rehabilitation Exoskeleton (C-LREX)

Abstract

Although Cable-driven rehabilitation devices (CDRDs) have several advantages over traditional link-driven devices, including their light weight, ease of reconfiguration, and remote actuation, the majority of existing lower-limb CDRDs are limited to rehabilitation in the sagittal plane. In this work, we proposed a novel three degrees of freedom (DOF) lower limb model which accommodates hip abduction/adduction motion in the frontal plane, as well as knee and hip flexion/extension in the sagittal plane. The proposed model was employed to investigate the feasibility of using bi-planar cable routing to track a bi-planar reference healthy trajectory. Various possible routings of four cable configurations were selected and studied with the 3DOF model. The optimal locations of the hip cuffs were determined using optimization. When compared with the five-cable routing configuration, the four-cable routing produced higher joint forces, which motivated the future study of other potential cable routing configurations and their ability to track bi-planar motion.