Design and control of a robotic wrist orthosis for joint rehabilitation

Ageing society in many countries has led to an increasing number of stroke and cerebral palsy patients who require rehabilitation therapy. Affected wrist joints often show an increased spasticity and stiffness, caused by impairments of surrounding muscles and tendons. However, the medical devices for wrist joint assessment and rehabilitation are lacking. This paper proposes a robotic orthosis to assist the patient's wrist to perform rehabilitation exercise in a compliant way. A 1-DOF robotic device with parallel mechanism is designed for the wrist joint by utilising pneumatic artificial muscles (PAMs) that are compliant and lightweight. The mechanical design of the wrist orthosis and the corresponding development of pneumatic control system will be also presented. A model-based pressure close-loop control strategy is implemented for the PAMs in order to track the trajectory in high-performance. Experiments on the orthosis demonstrated that the robot could assist the hand to move along a torque-sensitive trajectory with relatively small errors and the differential forces were also kept stable

Stretch reflex improves rolling stability during hopping of a decerebrate system

When humans hop, attitude recovery can be observed in both the sagittal and frontal planes. While it is agreed that the brain plays an important role in leg placement, the role of low-level feedback (the stretch reflex) on frontal plane stabilization remains unclear. Seeking to better understand the contribution of the soleus stretch reflex to rolling stability, we performed experiments on a biomimetic humanoid hopping robot. Various reflex responses to touching the floor, ranging from no response to long muscle activations, were examined, and the effect of a delay upon touching the floor was also examined. We found that the stretch reflex brought the system closer to stable, straight hopping. The presence of a delay did not affect the results; both the cases with and without a delay outperformed the case without a reflex response. The results of this study highlight the importance of low-level control in locomotion for which body stabilization does not require higher-level signals.This is the accepted manuscript. The final version is available at http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-3190/10/1/016008/meta;jsessionid=8394D6E9724906C836DC3624B5BF2F90.c1

Lower Limb Rehabilitation Using Patient Data

The aim of this study is to investigate the performance of a 6-DoF parallel robot in tracking the movement of the foot trajectory of a paretic leg during a single stride. The foot trajectories of nine patients with a paretic leg including both males and females have been measured and analysed by a Vicon system in a gait laboratory. Based on kinematic and dynamic analysis of a 6-DoF UPS parallel robot, an algorithm was developed in MATLAB to calculate the length of the actuators and their required forces during all trajectories. The workspace and singularity points of the robot were then investigated in nine different cases. A 6-DoF UPS parallel robot prototype with high repeatability was designed and built in order to simulate a single stride. Results showed that the robot was capable of tracking all of the trajectories with the maximum position error of 1.2 mm

Effect of flow compressibility in convergent-divergent nozzle

: Nozzles come in a range of shapes and sizes based on a purpose such as De Laval nozzle also known as the converging diverging nozzle. Convergent- divergent nozzle is commonly used in modern rocket engines that accelerates at high velocity till the supersonic region Ma>1. This paper aims to investigate numerically the effect of area ratio of the convergent divergent throat and the Mach number from the incompressible flow to compressible flow. The software that were used to simulate cases is ANSYS Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) code FLUENT. The area ratio throat (AR= 5mm, 6mm, 7mm, and 8mm) and Mach number (Ma = 0.2, 1.0 and 1.8) was varied to obtain more specific result. The result from this paper has shown that the most effective Mach number and area ratio are at the 0.2 Ma with the AR=5mm According to the findings of this research, the most effective Mach number and area ratio are at 0.2 Ma with AR=5mm. According to the calculations performed in this research, the percentage variation of velocity at 0.2Ma was larger than at 1.0 Ma and 1.8 Ma. This happen cause at the sonic and supersonic flow there is factor that disturb the flow such as the back pressure and normal shoc

Design and control of soft rehabilitation robots actuated by pneumatic muscles: State of the art

Robot-assisted rehabilitation has become a new mainstream trend for the treatment of stroke patients with movement disability. Pneumatic muscle (PM) is one of the most promising actuators for rehabilitation robots, due to its inherent compliance and safety features. In this paper, we conduct a systematic review on the soft rehabilitation robots driven by pneumatic muscles. This review discusses up to date mechanical structures and control strategies for PMs-actuated rehabilitation robots. A variety of state-of-the-art soft rehabilitation robots are classified and reviewed according to the actuation configurations. Special attentions are paid to control strategies under different mechanical designs, with advanced control approaches to overcome PM’s highly nonlinear and time-varying behaviors and to enhance the adaptability to different patients. Finally, we analyze and highlight the current research gaps and the future directions in this field, which is potential for providing a reliable guidance on the development of advanced soft rehabilitation robots

Design and Control of Robotic Systems for Lower Limb Stroke Rehabilitation

Lower extremity stroke rehabilitation exhausts considerable health care resources, is labor intensive, and provides mostly qualitative metrics of patient recovery. To overcome these issues, robots can assist patients in physically manipulating their affected limb and measure the output motion. The robots that have been currently designed, however, provide assistance over a limited set of training motions, are not portable for in-home and in-clinic use, have high cost and may not provide sufficient safety or performance. This thesis proposes the idea of incorporating a mobile drive base into lower extremity rehabilitation robots to create a portable, inherently safe system that provides assistance over a wide range of training motions. A set of rehabilitative motion tasks were established and a six-degree-of-freedom (DOF) motion and force-sensing system was designed to meet high-power, large workspace, and affordability requirements. An admittance controller was implemented, and the feasibility of using this portable, low-cost system for movement assistance was shown through tests on a healthy individual. An improved version of the robot was then developed that added torque sensing and known joint elasticity for use in future clinical testing with a flexible-joint impedance controller

Type-2 Takagi-Sugeno-Kang Fuzzy Logic System and Uncertainty in Machining

RÉSUMÉ: Plusieurs méthodes permettent aujourd’hui d’analyser le comportement des écoulements qui régissent le fonctionnement de systèmes rencontrés dans l’industrie (véhicules aériens, marins et terrestres, génération d’énergie, etc.). Pour les écoulements transitoires ou turbulents, les méthodes expérimentales sont utilisées conjointement avec les simulations numériques (simulation directe ou faisant appel à des modèles) afin d’extraire le plus d’information possible. Dans les deux cas, les méthodes génèrent des quantités de données importantes qui doivent ensuite être traitées et analysées. Ce projet de recherche vise à améliorer notre capacité d’analyse pour l’étude des écoulements simulés numériquement et les écoulements obtenus à l’aide de méthodes de mesure (par exemple la vélocimétrie par image de particules PIV ). L’absence, jusqu’à aujourd’hui, d’une définition objective d’une structure tourbillonnaire a conduit à l’utilisation de plusieurs méthodes eulériennes (vorticité, critère Q, Lambda-2, etc.), souvent inadaptées, pour extraire les structures cohérentes des écoulements. L’exposant de Lyapunov, calculé sur un temps fini (appelé le FTLE), s’est révélé comme une alternative lagrangienne efficace à ces méthodes classiques. Cependant, la méthodologie de calcul actuelle du FTLE exige l’évaluation numérique d’un grand nombre de trajectoires sur une grille cartésienne qui est superposée aux champs de vitesse simulés ou mesurés. Le nombre de noeuds nécessaire pour représenter un champ FTLE d’un écoulement 3D instationnaire atteint facilement plusieurs millions, ce qui nécessite des ressources informatiques importantes pour une analyse adéquate. Dans ce projet, nous visons à améliorer l’efficacité du calcul du champ FTLE en proposant une méthode alternative au calcul classique des composantes du tenseur de déformation de Cauchy-Green. Un ensemble d’équations différentielles ordinaires (EDOs) est utilisé pour calculer simultanément les trajectoires des particules et les dérivées premières et secondes du champ de déplacement, ce qui se traduit par une amélioration de la précision nodale des composantes du tenseur. Les dérivées premières sont utilisées pour le calcul de l’exposant de Lyapunov et les dérivées secondes pour l’estimation de l’erreur d’interpolation. Les matrices hessiennes du champ de déplacement (deux matrices en 2D et trois matrices en 3D) nous permettent de construire une métrique optimale multi-échelle et de générer un maillage anisotrope non structuré de façon à distribuer efficacement les noeuds et à minimiser l’erreur d’interpolation.----------ABSTRACT: Several methods can help us to analyse the behavior of flows that govern the operation of fluid flow systems encountered in the industry (aerospace, marine and terrestrial transportation, power generation, etc..). For transient or turbulent flows, experimental methods are used in conjunction with numerical simulations ( direct simulation or based on models) to extract as much information as possible. In both cases, these methods generate massive amounts of data which must then be processed and analyzed. This research project aims to improve the post-processing algorithms to facilitate the study of numerically simulated flows and those obtained using measurement techniques (e.g. particle image velocimetry PIV ). The absence, even until today, of an objective definition of a vortex has led to the use of several Eulerian methods (vorticity, the Q and the Lambda-2 criteria, etc..), often unsuitable to extract the flow characteristics. The Lyapunov exponent, calculated on a finite time (the so-called FTLE), is an effective Lagrangian alternative to these standard methods. However, the computation methodology currently used to obtain the FTLE requires numerical evaluation of a large number of fluid particle trajectories on a Cartesian grid that is superimposed on the simulated or measured velocity fields. The number of nodes required to visualize a FTLE field of an unsteady 3D flow can easily reach several millions, which requires significant computing resources for an adequate analysis. In this project, we aim to improve the computational efficiency of the FTLE field by providing an alternative to the conventional calculation of the components of the Cauchy-Green deformation tensor. A set of ordinary differential equations (ODEs) is used to calculate the particle trajectories and simultaneously the first and the second derivatives of the displacement field, resulting in a highly improved accuracy of nodal tensor components. The first derivatives are used to calculate the Lyapunov exponent and the second derivatives to estimate the interpolation error. Hessian matrices of the displacement field (two matrices in 2D and three matrices in 3D) allow us to build a multi-scale optimal metric and generate an unstructured anisotropic mesh to efficiently distribute nodes and to minimize the interpolation error. The flexibility of anisotropic meshes allows to add and align nodes near the structures of the flow and to remove those in areas of low interest. The mesh adaptation is based on the intersection of the Hessian matrices of the displacement field and not on the FTLE field

人のつま先制御能力を向上させる歩行訓練ロボットの適応的な介入手法の提案

早大学位記番号:新8439早稲田大