Iranian Journal of Mechanical Engineering Transactions of ISME

Iranian Journal of Mechanical Engineering Transactions of ISME

Design of an exoskeleton robot for rehabilitation of people with movement disabilities

Authors
Morteza Ahmadi Kermanshahi 1
Farzad Cheraghpour 2
A. Ghaffari 3
1 Department of Mechanical Engineering, South Branch, Islamic Azad University, Tehran, Iran
2 Department of Mechanical Engineering, Pardis Branch, Islamic Azad University, Tehran, Iran
3 Department of Mechanical Engineering, K. N. Toosi University of Technology, Tehran, Iran
10.30506/ijmep.2020.109351.1593
Abstract
In the nearly six decades, exoskeletons have progressed from the stuff of science fiction to
nearly commercialized products. While there are still many challenges associated with
exoskeleton development, the advances in the field have been enormous. In addition, the main
part in usage of these robots in the medical sciences and particularly for the rehabilitation,
specially disabled and elderly people is to help them to do their basic routine activities like
walking, sitting and etc. This article represents the design process of a lower limb exoskeleton
robot for helping disable people in gait cycle. First, the conceptual design of 7 Degrees of
Freedom (DoFs) robot, consist of 3-DoFs in each leg and 1-DoF in hip joint, is presented.
Then the dynamic modeling of mechanical system is shown by Lagrange Method. In addition
to producing an optimized mechanical model of the exoskeleton, it was necessary to ensure
the strength of each components. So that after the force analyzing of the robot components
which are designed for the lower limb extremities, the physical output information of the
modeling software (CATIA) is used as the dynamic model input and also in order to obtain
motion equation in the gait cycle always needed to choose an appropriate coordinate for
simulating closer to reality. In continuation of discussion a combined controller is designed to
investigate its performance. Finally, the system results are shown the maximum torque of 1st
joint is 32 N.m, the 2nd joint is 13 N.m and the 3rd joint is 3 N.m. The maximum torques lead
to select the suitable actuator for each link of robot.
Keywords
exoskeleton
lower limb extremity
rehabilitation
force analyzing
Subjects
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  • Receive Date 10 June 2019
  • Revise Date 20 October 2019
  • Accept Date 23 December 2020