Design and Analysis of a Flexible, Elastic, and Rope-Driven Parallel Mechanism for Wrist Rehabilitation

This paper proposes a bionic flexible wrist parallel mechanism to simulate human wrist joints, which is characterized by a rope-driven, compression spring-supported hybrid mechanism. Specifically, to realize the movement of the wrist mechanism, a parallel structure is adopted to support the mobile platform and is controlled by a cable, which plays the role of wrist muscles. Because the compression spring is elastic, it is difficult to directly solve inverse kinematics. To address this problem, the external force acting on the moving platform is firstly equivalent to the vector force and torque at the center of the moving platform. Then, based on inverse kinematic and static analyses, the inverse motion of the robot model can be solved according to the force and torque balance conditions and the lateral spring bending equation of the compression spring. In order to verify the proposed method, kinematics, statics, and parallel mechanism workspace are further analyzed by the software MATLAB. The obtained results demonstrate the effectiveness and feasibility of the designed parallel mechanism. This work offers new insights into the parallel mechanism with flexible joints in replicating the movements of the human wrist, thus promoting the development of rehabilitation robots and rope-driven technology to some extent.