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Development of a Prototype to Rehabilitate Knee and Ankle Injuries, Using a Parallel Robot with 6 Degrees of Freedom

Abstract:

The present research objective was to design and build a prototype of a robot to emulate ankle and knee rehabilitation, studying at first the types of movements that the ankle and knee need during a therapy, for which a parallel robot with a zero-rated kinematic chain was selected to facilitate the therapy that an injured lower limb needs. It was necessary to solve the problem of the inverse kinematics of the 6 degrees of freedom Stewart platform to position the prototype in the desired rehabilitation position. Finally, for the control was implemented an arduino card that is responsible for positioning the electric linear actuators of the parallel robot, to achieve the sequence of movements of restoration of the lower limb were introduced in the programming displacement values of the actuators calculated based on the solution of reverse kinematics solved by the software Matlab for each of the rehabilitation positions studied. The developed prototype allows to emulate the movements made by a physiotherapist during the movement therapy in knee and ankle injuries, for which it was validated by a physiotherapist.