Control of a Virtual Prototype for Ankle Rehabilitation

Humans being subject to traumatic accidents which cause they cannot carry out activities of daily living. When a muscle is not used or gets weak, it tends to shorten, the joints become stiff, causing deformities or contractures and without a physical therapy lose their aptitudes. Ankle rehabilitation systems have been proposed to achieve the full range of motion and stretching smoothly the muscles and tendons. In this paper we propose a virtual prototype of an ankle rehabilitation machine which provides the whole range of ankle related foot movements. The controllers are designed with trajectory tracking task to provide smooth movements of rehabilitation in a single motion or the combination of two movements. Some simulation results using the mathematical model are presented and compared with the obtained from the virtual prototype simulated under the ADAMS environment.