Development of a Robot-assisted Virtual Rehabilitation System with Haptic Feedback

In this paper, the issue of integrating haptic technology of a robotic system and virtual environment is discussed. A robot-assisted virtual rehabilitation system is developed for bilateral training and telerehabilitation. In the system, we designed a training scene in the Unity game engine for these two rehabilitation modes, the proposed framework between two robots and virtual environment can allow the end-effectors to perform tasks as hand avatars in Unity and provide force feedback from virtual environment, the haptic rendering is generated on robot's end-effector using a task-space impedance controller. Besides providing the feeling of interaction with virtual objects, we proposed a robot-assisted strategy to provide assistance force when the patient is unable to finish the task in virtual training scene, the assistance force can guide the patient to training path. We provide experiment results to demonstrate the performance of proposed system.