Development of parallel mechanism with six degrees of freedom for ankle rehabilitation

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Abstract
With the aging population problem getting more and more aggravated, the number of hemiplegia patients increases rapidly, which results in the increasing requirement of rehabilitation training for regaining the body movement function. Taking advantages of rehabilitation robots makes the rehabilitation training more scientific and efficient compared to traditional rehabilitation measures such as manual training. By now, many types of rehabilitation robots have been proposed by researchers. However, from the view of the physiological structure, many of them can't well fit the motion characteristics. Ankle plays an important role in standing, walking and so on. As the motion of these robots is different from the motion characteristics of ankles, it would make an undesired influence on the training effect. Rehabilitation robots have many structures, and they are mainly serial mechanism and parallel mechanism. However, serial mechanism is inconvenient to package. In this paper, a new type of parallel mechanism with six degrees of freedom is proposed. The basic principle structure of the ankle rehabilitation robot in this paper would be done according to the medical requirement and engineering requirement. After determine the programmer of the mechanism, the degrees of freedom of the mechanism would be calculated by the screw theory, and the Solid works software would be used to simulate and analyze the movement of the mechanism so that the torque and power calculation of key positions of the mechanism would be done with the simulation data. At last, the specific design of the mechanism would be finished with the obtained feasible basic principle structure. The function of different components would be introduced and this paper would check the key components to ensure the reliability of the mechanism.