Design analysis of a pneumatic muscle driven wearable parallel robot for ankle joint rehabilitation

This paper describes the kinematics and the dynamics of a 3-DOF pneumatic muscle driven wearable parallel robot designed for ankle rehabilitation treatments. Several important performance indices are identified to accomplish the requirements of the ankle rehabilitation treatment and the wearable robot design. It is found that some of these indices are conflicting and hence in order to obtain an optimal robot design, these indices are required to be simultaneously optimized. Consequently, a multi-objective optimization scheme based on evolutionary algorithms is proposed in this paper to find a design which has optimum performance. The proposed design analysis can be generalized with modest efforts for the development of all the classes of parallel robots.