Mechanical Design of an Exoskeletal Master Device for Upper-Limb Rehabilitation Robot

Abstract Upper limb rehabilitation exoskeleton can be a good substitute for professional therapists in rehabilitation training for stroke patients, but few devices can accurately obtain the upper limb rehabilitation movements of therapists or patients on the healthy side to guide the rehabilitation exoskeleton in passive rehabilitation of patients. In this paper, a 10-DOF exoskeletal master device is proposed, which includes all the degrees of freedom of upper limb, and is improved from two aspects of kinematic analysis and structural design. By studying the motion of the whole upper limb, especially the shoulder joint, the complete upper limb motion chain is proposed in this paper, and the feasibility is verified by kinematics analysis. Then the structure design is carried out and introduced in detail. Finally, genetic algorithm was used to optimize the structural parameters of pHRI, which provided a reference for Physical human–robot-interface (pHRI) transplantation to different exoskeleton devices.