Control Strategies and Artificial Intelligence in Rehabilitation Robotics

WINTER 2015 23 As robotics moved from industrial to service applications, engineers began looking for new tasks that could be automated with robots. Industrial tasks had been a perfect candidate for automation since they are physically exhausting and require high precision. Motor rehabilitation seemed like a similarly appropriate robotics application. In the course of rehabilitation, the patient must exercise by performing limb motions thousands of times, and the therapist must physically support and guide the patient’s limb during these motions. Since therapists inevitably get exhausted, a rehabilitation robot could support and guide the limb instead. Numerous rehabilitation robots have been designed for both the upper (figure 1) and lower limbs (figure 2). The two most famous arm rehabilitation robots are the MIT-MANUS, now sold as the InMotion ARM (Interactive Motion Technologies, USA) and the ARMin, now sold as the ArmeoPower