Robot system for rehabilitation of wrist using bilateral control base on disturbance observer

In recent years, rehabilitation technology has been widely researched in order to help stroke patient recovery. In this research, a new wrist robot assistive system has been proposed by using bilateral control system based on disturbance observer. The proposed wrist robot assistive system consists of master and slave robot. The bilateral control supplies interaction force feedback information of rehabilitation training through a master robot of the physician. On the other hand, a slave robot is applied to interact with the patient. This paper also deals with the construction of disturbance observer to estimate external force between patient and physician. From the results, it is confirmed that the disturbance observer can be used instead of the real force sensor. By using the proposed bilateral controller, it is possible to provide a high transparency and good perception interaction force of assisting rehabilitation training. The simulation results are provided to illustrate the performance of the proposed algorithms.

I. Introduction

In recent years, the rehabilitation robotics can be considered a challenge research to increase opportunities for facilitating access between physiotherapist and patient. One of interesting field to be applied for rehabilitation treatment is the technology of bilateral control system used in master - slave robot control. We were looking on scarcity in rehabilitation robot technology, an experience of rehabilitation robot and amount of physiotherapist in each region or country. Focus on the experience; patients have a different age or point of disorder then require different treatment/techniques of physical therapy each. So we had the idea to make both unite to achieve increasingly high performance is the idea to use robots as an intermediary between doctors and patients.