Variable Impedance Control of a Rehabilitation Robot for Modelling Physiotherapist’s Motions

This paper presents a variable impedance control method, which is used to teach a lower limb rehabilitation robot how to imitate exercise motions applied to a patient by a physiotherapist. To achieve this task, the characteristics of physiotherapist’s motion are investigated. The proposed control method is based on estimating stiffness parameter of a physiotherapist’s arm and generating impedance parameters of the robot to model the exercise motions. The effectiveness of proposed method is shown with simulation results.

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