A New Type of Ankle-Foot Rehabilitation Robot Based on Muscle Motor Characteristics

Ankle injury and dysfunction are always accompanied by abnormal peripheral tissues. In order to achieve a more comprehensive rehabilitation training, this article firstly studies the movement characteristics of the surrounding muscles of the ankle-foot. The human musculoskeletal model in OpenSim is used for human exercise experiment. And the relationship between different muscles around the ankle-foot and the direction of the ankle-foot movement are measured respectively, so as to formulate ankle-foot static/dynamic rehabilitation strategies related to the auxiliary training of the ankle-foot muscle. In order to implement the established rehabilitation exercise strategy and to reduce the control difficulty of rehabilitation robot, a new type of decoupling series-parallel mechanism with three rotations and one movement is proposed. After analyzing the degree of freedom and the positive kinematics solution, it is proved that it is completely decoupled in kinematics, can realize the independence of motion control, and there is no singular space. Then, under the premise of meeting the space required for the implementation of the rehabilitation strategy, the proposed new ankle-foot rehabilitation robot is optimized in terms of structure and component size, which improves its space utilization and optimizes the overall mechanical performance. Finally, the dynamic simulation experiment is carried out with the dynamic rehabilitation strategy as the goal, which proves that the robot can realize the normal gait simulation movement in sitting posture, and the motion control of the robot is independent of each other and shows good dynamic performance. Through investigation, the ankle-foot rehabilitation robot designed in this article is cost-effective.