Bio-inspired Control of a Rehabilitation Robot Actuated by Pneumatic Artificial Muscles

Wearable rehabilitation robots can bring great help to the elderly and sport injury patients. However, most of the current traditional rehabilitation robots adopt rigid actuators, which limits their compliance and human-robot interaction performance. In this paper, a novel upper limb rehabilitation robot actuated by pneumatic artificial muscles is developed and its dynamic model is constructed for control issue. In order to achieve more accurate and adaptive rehabilitation robot control, this paper proposes a bio-inspired control architecture and cerebellum-like controller network. To demonstrate the control effect of the proposed theoretical method, a series of simulations are conducted on the robot, and the results show that the proposed controller has good tracking performance and adaptation.