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Humanitarian military applications
Introduction
A patient post-stroke may lose control of the joints of the upper limb. Fortunately, the motive functions and even the working abilities may restore if the patients are treated with effective rehabilitation exercise ([10] Kahn et al. , 2004). Generally, rehabilitation exercise is carried out by physical therapists based on a person-to-person therapy to the body of patient. But the efficiency of the manual rehabilitation exercise is limited by the therapist's physical ability. Rehabilitation robot can take the place of the therapist to a certain extent and it can apply more intensive and efficiency rehabilitation exercises to the patients post-stroke ([3] Cozens, 1999). Ideally, besides enough physical therapy, rehabilitation robot should provide high levels of safety and flexibility rehabilitation exercises.
In our research, all the joints of the rehabilitation robot are powered by pneumatic muscle actuators (PMAs) because PMAs are contribute to more safety and comfort for rehabilitation joints than that of electric motor. The weight of the rehabilitation joint would be more lighter and its mechanism would be more simple with PMAs. The main advantage of PMA is that its behavior is very similar to that of human muscle ([5] Repperger et al. , 2006), such as its manner of work, range of shorten, high power/weight ratio and response time.
Many previous researches focused on the characteristics of joint powered by PMAs. [1] Balasubramanian et al. (2006) studied on the dynamic property of PMA for design of therapeutic robot, their researches were based on a rehabilitation joint that driven by only one PMA (single driven). [9] Lilly (2005) applied a sliding mode controller to a planar elbow manipulator actuated by PMAs in an opposing pair configuration (double driven), and obtained good accuracy in tracking control. The studies of [7], [8] Lilly (2003, 2004) and [11] Ahn and Thanh (2004) are mainly focused on control algorithms and precision.
The main aim of this paper is to present the static and dynamic characteristics of the rehabilitation joint powered by PMAs.
The rest of the paper is arranged as follows. Section of the experiment environment, the kinetic analysis of the rehabilitation joint, the static property and static-state mode of the rehabilitation joint, the dynamic property and dynamic mode of the rehabilitation joint, this...