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A Series-elastic Robot for Back-pain Rehabilitation

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  • Robot and Applications
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Abstract

This paper addresses the robot-assisted rehabilitation of back pain, an epidemic health problem affecting a large portion of the population. The design is composed of two springs in series connected to an end-effector via a pair of antagonistic cables. The spring and cable arrangement forms an elastic coupling from the actuator to the output shaft. An input-output torque model of the series-elastic mechanism is established and studied numerically. The study also illustrates the variation of the mechanism’s effective stiffness by changing the springs’ position. In addition, we built a prototype of the robotic mechanism and design experiments with a robotic manipulator to experimentally investigate its dynamic characteristics. The experimental results confirm the predicted elasticity between the input motion and the output torque at the end-effector. We also observe an agreement between the data generated by the torque model and data collected from the experiments. An experiment with a full-scale robot and a human subject is carried out to investigate the human-robot interaction and the mechanism behavior.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Mechanical Engineering, South Dakota State University, Brookings, South Dakota, USA

    ElHussein Shata, Kim-Doang Nguyen, Praneel Acharya & Jeffrey Doom

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  1. ElHussein Shata
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  2. Kim-Doang Nguyen
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  3. Praneel Acharya
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  4. Jeffrey Doom
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Kim-Doang Nguyen.

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Publisher’s Note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Recommended by Associate Editor Yangmin Li under the direction of Editor Doo Yong Lee. This work is supported by the FY20 Competitive Research Grant Program of South Dakota Board of Regents.

ElHussein Shata received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in mechanical engineering from South Dakota State University (SDSU), USA, in 2016 and 2020, respectively. His research interests include variable stiffness actuators, classical control systems, and machine design.

Kim-Doang Nguyen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at SDSU. He received his Ph.D. degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign (UIUC) in 2015. Between 2015 and 2017, he was a postdoctoral scientist at UIUC and the University of Technology Sydney, Australia. His research interests include control theory, time-delay systems, and robotics.

Praneel Acharya received his B.E. degree from Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics in 2017. He is currently pursuing a Ph.D. degree in mechanical engineering at SDSU. His research interests include robotic manipulation, motion planning, control, and computer vision.

Jeffrey Doom received his Ph.D. degree from University of Minnesota in 2009. He is currently an Assistant Professor in mechanical engineering at SDSU. His research interests include computational fluid dynamics, fluid mechanics, and modeling and simulation.

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Shata, E., Nguyen, KD., Acharya, P. et al. A Series-elastic Robot for Back-pain Rehabilitation. Int. J. Control Autom. Syst. 19, 1054–1064 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12555-019-0859-x

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