Mechanism Design and ADAMSMATLABSimulation of a Novel Ankle Rehabilitation Robot * As the population continues to grow, stroke has become one of the major diseases that threaten the health of the elderly people. As a product of combination of medicine and Engineering, the ankle rehabilitation robot can assist ankle joints patients with rehabilitation training and has a good prospect of application. This paper presents an ankle rehabilitation robot for hemiplegic patients. Firstly, the physiological structure of human ankle joint is introduced and the design requirements of robot are put forward. Then the three components of the robot mechanism (the internalexternal rotation mechanism, the dorsiflexionplantarflexion mechanism, the inversioneversion mechanism) are described in detail and the motion range of each joint is analyzed. The dynamics model in ADAMS and the control model in Simulink of the novel ankle rehabilitation robot are built based on the mechanism model. Based on the ADAMS and MATLAB cosimulation technology, dynamics analysis and control analysis of the ankle rehabilitation robot are carried out. Compared with experimental data, the simulation results show the feasibility of the mechanism design and control scheme. The difficulties and practicability of the cosimulation technology in the ankle rehabilitation robot are further discussed.

Coupling Disturbance Compensated MIMO Control of Parallel Ankle Rehabilitation Robot Actuated by Pneumatic Muscles To solve the poor compliance and safety problems in current rehabilitation robots, a novel twodegreesoffreedom (2DOF) soft ankle rehabilitation robot driven by pneumatic muscles (PMs) is presented, taking advantages of the PMxe2x80x99s inherent compliance and the parallel structurexe2x80x99s high stiffness and payload capacity. However, the PMxe2x80x99s nonlinear, timevarying and hysteresis characteristics, and the coupling interference from parallel structure, as well as the unpredicted disturbance caused by arbitrary human behavior all raise difficulties in achieving highprecision control of the robot. In this paper, a multiinputmultioutput disturbance compensated sliding mode controller (MIMODCSMC) is proposed to tackle these problems. The proposed control method can tackle the unmodeled uncertainties and the coupling interference existed in multiple PMsxe2x80x99 synchronous movement, even with the subjectxe2x80x99s participation. Experiment results on a healthy subject confirmed that the PMsactuated ankle rehabilitation robot controlled by the proposed MIMODCSMC is able to assist patients to perform highaccuracy rehabilitation tasks by tracking the desired trajectory in a compliant manner.