Modelling of a Cable-driven Ankle Rehabilitation Robot

Ankle injury is one of physical injury that commonly occurs in sports or domestic-related activities. Presently, there are various established treatments for ankle rehabilitation in hospital or rehabilitation clinic. This involves a range of motion treatment exercise and endurance treatment exercise. However, current treatment requires patients to frequently visit to the hospital which is tedious and also repetitive. One of the solutions to deal with the repetitiveness of the treatment is to introduce an automated device such as a robot that can help the therapist to perform this repetitive task on the patients. A concept design for a cable driven ankle rehabilitation robot has been proposed for this task. The reason for selecting cable-based design is the design is lighter than a rigidly based robot. This adds up its potential for mobility and portability which allows convenience to the users. The focus of this paper is to present inverse kinematics analysis and modelling of the proposed concept design of the robot which aimed to determine the feasibility of the concept design. Overall, the modelling of the cable-based ankle rehabilitation robot using inverse kinematics is feasible to project or to predict the trajectory paths of the moving platform of the robot. This will be useful for planning suitable dimension for fabrication of the robot.