Abstract:
In the field of rehabilitation, lower-limbs therapeutic exercise has become a
challenging job for medical professionals in COVID-19 pandemic. Providing
manual therapy to lower limbs is not an easy task and, in most cases, it involves
multiple persons. Moreover, it is a monotonous job, and the service providers
need to be in close contact with the patient thereby creating the risk of
infection. In this circumstance, robot-assisted rehabilitation exercise for lower
limbs offers a risk-free solution. This paper presents dynamic modeling and
control simulation of One Degree of Freedom robotic chair-arm (robotic arm
attached with a special chair). The control structure is designed with two
compensators for position and velocity control. The simulation results show
that the proposed system has a good potential in providing automatic
rehabilitation therapy for lower limbs, especially for knee joint range of motion
exercise. The results also indicate faster responses with settling time less than
0.04 second and steady-state error below 0.05. The findings show that a robotic
chair arm can be used for providing automatic therapy to patients in situations
like COVID-19 pandemic.
