여자유도 메커니즘의 링크 길이 최적화에 기반한 인체 상지 재활로봇 시스템의 설계

Abstract

Robots are recently being studied in diverse areas, and the development of the wearable robot for special purposes, including for the support or reinforcement of human muscle power, is also being accelerated. The wearable robot refers to an external-frame-type robot that a person can wear and that supports his/her behavior or gives him/her superhuman power. This is a human-robot-unified system that is realized by the cooperation of a human being and a robot. The wearable robot is designed in the form of the human body, considering the human skeleton structure. It can be used for muscle power rehabilitation, reinforcement, and replacement. It can also be classified into the support type and the independent type, according to the hardware type. We have been studying robotic exoskeletons to assist the motion of persons who have problems with their muscle function in daily activities and rehabilitation. The upper-limb motions (shoulder, elbow and wrist motion) are especially important for such persons to perform daily activities. Generally for shoulder motion 3DOF is needed to describe its motion(extension/flexion, abduction/adduction, internal/external rotation) but we have used a redundant actuator thus making a 4 DOF system. In this paper, a five-degrees-of-freedom robot (four degrees of freedom at the shoulder joint and one degree of freedom at the elbow joint) was studied and kinematically designed so that the angle at the shoulder joint actuation parts could be optimized, to smoothly expand the degree of freedom of the human joint, supplement the existing prototype, and avoid the kinematical singular point of the robot. This research will ensure that the proposed wearable robot system make human's motion more powerfully and more easily.