Abstract
Several rehabilitation robots for upper limbs have been proposed so far, and clinical effectiveness was reported in several studies for the aged people or patients with stroke. However most of them have only 2-DOF for its active motion. It is important to design a rehabilitation system which trains in the 3-DOF space because the upper limbs of human work in 3-DOF space even expect for the wrist. We developed the quasi 3-DOF rehabilitation system which has 2-DOF force-feedback function in working plane but its working plane can be adjusted the inclination. And we named it Hybrid-PLEMO for it can be switched between active type and passive type. Hybrid-PLEMO is a compact, low-cost rehabilitation system for upper limbs with high safety by using ER brakes or ER actuators. In this paper, we describe the mechanism of Hybrid-PLEMO.