Repeated and intensive gait training can improve muscle strength and movement coordination of patients with neurological or orthopedic impairments. However, conventional physical therapy by a physiotherapist is laborious and expensive. Therefore, this therapy is not accessible for the majority of patients. This paper presents a six-bar linkage mechanism for human gait rehabilitation with a natural ankle trajectory. Firstly, a six-bar linkage mechanism is selected as the original mechanism to construct a gait rehabilitation device. Then the ankle trajectory is formulated as a function of the crank angle. And the rotation angle of the crank is set as a linear function of time. Therefore, constant speed motor is sufficient to control the mechanism. For the dimensional synthesis, the precise point distances of the gait trajectory and the coupler curve are set as objective functions, with the kinematic constraints including in the optimization procedure. To obtain the optimal structure design parameters, a cooperative dual particle swarm optimization algorithm is developed. The results show that the coupler curve matches well with the gait trajectory. The average distance between the 60 precision points is 3.5 mm.

中文翻译：

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机械辅助神经康复：一种用于步态康复的新型六连杆机构


重复和强化的步态训练可以提高神经或骨科损伤患者的肌肉力量和运动协调性。然而，物理治疗师进行的传统物理治疗既费力又昂贵。因此，大多数患者无法接受这种疗法。本文提出了一种用于具有自然踝关节轨迹的人类步态康复的六连杆机构。首先，选择六连杆机构作为原始机构构建步态康复装置。然后将脚踝轨迹公式化为曲柄角的函数。并且曲柄的旋转角度被设置为时间的线性函数。因此，恒速电机足以控制该机构。对于维度综合，步态轨迹和耦合器曲线的精确点距离被设置为目标函数，运动学约束包括在优化过程中。为了获得最优的结构设计参数，开发了一种协作双粒子群优化算法。结果表明耦合器曲线与步态轨迹吻合良好。 60个精度点之间的平均距离为3.5毫米。