Cylinder-Wheel Coupled Robot with Buttocks-Support Mechanism for Lower-Limb Rehabilitation Training

Rehabilitation robot plays an increasingly important role in the treatment of spinal cord injuries for reducing the human surgeons' workload and meeting the rapidly growing clinical demands. However, extant treadmill-based rehabilitation robot presents challenges due to complicated gait generation mechanism and human-machine interaction mismatch. Hence, we designed a cylinder-wheel coupled medical robot for lower-limb rehabilitation training. The robot used a motorized track and two electric cylinders in each limb to match the patient's three joints rotation, and generated gait motion through the coordination of the left and right limbs. The robot employed a dynamic buttocks-support mechanism to reduce the patient's impedance torque during training, avoiding the use of a complex body weight support (BWS) system commonly used in existing rehabilitation robots. 3D simulation results demonstrated the high usability of this novel design in gait generation, showing promising potential to solve the bottlenecks that emerged in treadmill-based rehabilitation robots.