Kinematics analysis, design, and simulation of a dual-arm robot for upper limb physiotherapy

Robot-assisted therapy offers a promising approach to rehabilitation, particularly for severely to moderately impaired stroke patients. This paper presents the Dual-Arm End-Effector-Based Rehabilitation Robot (DEREROB), which is a robotic system for upper limb physiotherapy including two co-operating robot arms. With this configuration, the robot arms of DEREROB are connected to the patient's upper arm and forearm respectively, which mimics the therapist's arms to provide the rehabilitation treatment. The kinematics model has been framed by D-H method and kinematics simulation has been carried out to verify that the DEREROB can assist the affected arm move in 3D space.