Dual-Arm Upper Limb Rehabilitation Robot: Mechanism Design and Preliminary Experiments

Stroke affects thousands of people worldwide and nearly half of stroke survivors suffer from upper limb deficits affecting their daily activities. Task-oriented, repetitive and intensive physiotherapy can enhance upper limb rehabilitation for stroke patients. Rehabilitation robots, with the advantages of delivering high-dosage and high-intensity training over long time, have gained high popularity in physiotherapy. In this work, the Dual-Arm Rehabilitation Robot (DARR), an end-effector system with collaborative manipulators assisting the upper and lower arms of a stroke patient respectively, was proposed. Each manipulator of the DARR, with three active degrees of freedom (DOF) for positioning and three passive DOF for orientation, can provide rehabilitation training to the affected arm in a three-dimensional workspace and permit stroke patients to freely orient his/her hand as needed to grasp an object. The DARR prototype was built and conducted experiments to validate its feasibility and effectiveness, including mechanical structure and control system. Both simulation and experimental results showed that the DARR could satisfy the demands of upper limb rehabilitation for stroke patients.