Posture control using new ankle-foot assist device with Stewart Platform type parallel link mechanisms

In this research, we developed a novel ankle-foot assist device for rehabilitation and walking assistant purpose. This device can measure and assist 6 DOFs movement of human ankle joint by using a Stewart Platform mechanism, which can adapt to the displacement of the rotation axis during the movement of human foot. In this paper, we validate the motion measurement and motion control performance of this developed assist device. We conducted the static measurement performance verification experiment and motion reproduction performance verification experiment. Translation error measured by this developed assist device is less than 0.5 [mm], and rotation error measured by this developed assist device is smaller than 0.6 [deg]. Mean of reproducibility that calculated by means of Cross correlation function is 0.98. These experimental results showed the validity of this developed assist device.