Rehab Robotics - Open-loop identification of a 2 degrees of freedom rehabilitation robot actuated with pneumatic artificial muscles

Nowadays, the number of stroke victims continues to grow over the years. The resulting motor impairments are manifold and have a strong impact on the daily life of the affected person. To recover the lost skills, an intensive rehabilitation procedure is essential. As those movements and the associated programs are time consuming and must be optimized, the robots progressively entered the medical field to assist therapists those last decades. A pneumatic artificial muscles actuated robot was developed by Louvain Bionics and INSA Toulouse with the aim of post-stroke upper-limb rehabilitation. The objectives of this thesis are to solve the previously identified mechanical problems and to perform open-loop characterization of the device, highlighting its limitations and identifying its dynamics and the one of its actuators. The investigations on the pneumatic artificial muscle actuated robot have shown promising abilities in torque and stiffness depending, however, on the geometrical configuration of the robot. The robot dynamics can be described by a mass-spring-damper system and the pressure regulators dynamics by a second order transfer function. They have adaptive parameters evolving with the spatial position. The device has good prospects to enter the medical field if associated with a closed loop controller.