Design of Suspended Cable-Driven Parallel Robot with Series Elastic Actuator for 3-DOF Body Weight Support System

Body Weight Support (BWS) systems are used to maintain balance and compensate for the weight of patients during gait rehabilitation following neurological injuries such as stroke. Existing commercialized BWS systems are capable of providing support during overground walking in a relatively large workspace and can actively control multi-directional forces by using several actuators. However, with these systems, it is not possible to control independently the force in each direction. Therefore, this study proposed a novel active BWS system capable of independent force control in each direction in a large workspace through the integration of a Cable-Driven Parallel Robot (CDPR) with a Series Elastic Actuator (SEA). In addition, the force controller for generating the desired wrench is verified through dynamic analysis using ADAMS® & Simulink Co-Simulation. The desired wrench generation performance of the CDPR+SEA system was compared with that of the system without a SEA. The results show that the CDPR combined with SEA has shown successful wrench force generation performance compared to the CDPR system without SEA. Thus, the system has a high control capability.