Cable-Driven Parallel Robot Workspace Identification and Optimal Design Based on the Upper Limb Functional Rehabilitation

An assessment of the human motion repeatability for three selected Activities of Daily Living (ADL) is performed in this paper. These exercises were prescribed by an occupational therapist for the upper limb rehabilitation. The movement patterns of five participants, recorded using a Qualisys motion capture system, are compared based on the Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) method. This survey is motivated by the need to find the appropriate task workspace of a 6-degrees of freedom cable-driven parallel robot for upper limb rehabilitation, which is able to reproduce the three selected exercises. This comparison is performed to justify, whether or not, there is enough similarity between the participants’ gestures, and so a single reference trajectory can be adopted as the robot-prescribed workspace. Using the results of the comparative study, an optimization process of the sought robot design is carried out, where the structure size and the cable tensions simultaneously minimized.