Shoulder Adaptable and Elbow Singularity-free Exoskeleton

This paper presents an innovative exoskeleton for upper limb robot-assisted neuro-rehabilitation that maintains the complex movement of the shoulder thanks to a hybrid serial and parallel kinematic mechanism. Despite the advantages guaranteed by exoskeleton-based structures in neuro-rehabilitation, classical mechanisms present drawbacks due to position mismatches between the exoskeleton shoulder and the human shoulder (lack of compliance and improper design can lead to unnatural limb shoulder movements and undesired internally generated forces). The proposed solution overcomes this problem and has been designed to properly face the complex shoulder movements and to address the limitation of singularity drawbacks at elbow level.