Design of Serial Link Structure-Parallel Wire System for Virtual Reality Rehabilitation and Assessment

Abstract

Wearable robotics is a rapidly evolving field with assistive exoskeletons being developed for medical and industrial purposes. These exoskeletons can be used for gait rehabilitation of patients, arm rehabilitation and provide body support during training. These exoskeletal systems are anthropomorphically structured mechanisms where the rigid links form a serial kinematic chain and the cables are attached in a parallel configuration. Cable-driven system eliminates the need of rigid links and mechanical joints, making the system lightweight. Due to the serial unilateral constraints, it has to be ensured that all cables remain in tension at any point of time for system functionality. This results in redundancy in the actuation system. The aim of this paper is to provide the design and analysis of these multilink cable-driven robots (MCDRs). From the information of workspace, we can check whether the cable driven exoskeleton is able to perform the desired behavior (gait motion) with positive cable tensions and without violating defined constraints.