Kinematic analysis and control for upper limb robotic rehabilitation system

Present physical rehabilitation practice implies one-to-one therapist - patient interactions. This leads to shortage of therapists and high costs for patient or healthcare insurance systems. Along with Prokinetic Rehabilitation Clinic, we proposed a new intelligent, adaptive robotic system (RAPMES), which can provide the rehabilitation protocols, defined by a therapist, for the wrist and elbow of upper limb, considering the patient reactions and based on real-time feedback. RAPMES is a passive rehabilitation robotic system (RRS) with 3 degrees of freedom, and assists the rehabilitation process for elbow, forearm and wrist movements. Computation of the kinematic model for the RAPMES robotic device is required in order to determine the parameters associated with the mechanical joints, so that the experimental model executes certain trajectories in space. In this paper, we will present both forward and inverse kinematics determined for the experimental model. The kinematic model was implemented in Matlab environment, and we present a series of simulations, conducted in order to validate the proposed kinematic model. Then, we impose the functional movements (determined using the real-time video motion analysis system, as polynomial movement functions) as input to the kinematic model, and we present a series of simulations and results. The RAPMES control algorithm includes the kinematic model, and uses the polynomial movement functions as control input.