Impedance-based Control of a Cable Driven Rehabilitation Robot

Abstract

In this study, the design and control of a rehabilitation robot, Romres, are presented. Romres is a neurological rehabilitation device, which can make patients do exercises for both upper and lower limbs within a wide range of motion. The most important property of Romres is that it has a special design, which allows doing intensive treatment to the patients, who are in the immobilization period, without any inconvenience for a long time. Romres rehabilitation robot can make three type of exercises. These are the passive exercise, the active assisted exercise and the active resisted exercise. The robot can decide to choose which type of exercise to apply to the patient depending on the force applied to the device by the patient. Impedance control is used as the control method. The control system includes a disturbance observer for compensating friction and other disturbances. The performance of the robot is tested in a test setup. The experiments show successful results.