Robotic Rehabilitation System for Human Upper Limbs Using Guide Control and Manipulability Ellipsoid Prediction

In this paper, we propose a robotic assistive control system for rehabilitation of the human arm. The admittance control produced low stiffness in the moving direction and high stiffness in the orthogonal direction. Using the admittance control for guide control, subjects can easily move their arms in accordance with the virtual guide line. The manipulability ellipsoid is obtained by image processing and singular value decomposition of the Jacobian matrix. The major axis of the ellipse indicates the easiest direction for the operation. The proposed guide control using admittance control and the manipulability ellipsoid was confirmed to be very effective.