Design of a Soft Robot Using Pneumatic Muscles for Elbow Rehabilitation

The field of rehabilitation robot has grown rapidly in these years. And soft actuated rehabilitation robots prove to have some unique advantages over rigid body motor-driven rehabilitative robots. In this paper, a soft robot with two degree of freedom (DOF) was designed to assist the rehabilitation of elbow. Pneumatic muscles were built up and tested. They were assembled to make the whole device. A set of experiments were conducted to evaluate the functioning. The results and the analysis show that the device could finish the rehabilitation process on elbow under proper control. Future improvement are discussed in this paper.