Cooperative Control of a Dual-arm Rehabilitation Robot for Upper Limb Physiotherapy and Training

Many stroke patients suffer from upper limb motor impairments, but physical therapy resources are often limited. Rehabilitation robots which can provide more intensive, repetitive and interactive training, are being increasingly used in upper limb physiotherapy and training. In this work, a dual-arm robot for upper limb rehabilitation named DAREROB was proposed. A motion controller for coordinating the trajectories of two robots, which took into account the human arm kinematical constraints and utilized a master/slave scheme, was presented. This cooperative control strategy can adjust the DAREROB in real time according to the movements of human upper limb to prevent injuries during physiotherapy. The DAREROB system was modeled and simulated in MATLAB and ADAMS, and the controller was tested using a computational simulation, to verify the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed cooperative control scheme.