Abstract
Safety is one of the most important issues in rehabilitation robot suits. We have presented a rehabilitation robot suit equipped with two hardware-based safety devices. The robot suit assists a knee joint of a patient. The safety devices consist of only mechanical components without actuators, controllers, or batteries. We call one device the "velocity-based safety device" and the other device the "torque-based safety device". We expect that the safety devices guarantee the safety even if the computer does not work. In this paper, we firstly review the rehabilitation robot suit equipped with the safety devices. Secondly, we present experimental results to verify the effectiveness of the prototype safety devices. Finally, we describe the design details of a rehabilitation robot taking into consideration the experimental results.
