<p>With the emphasis on the safety of human rehabilitation training, cable traction robots are widely used in the rehabilitation and medical treatment, but the issues of strong-coupling between cables and insufficient driving force increase the structure complexity and the controlling difficulty. Therefore, a flexible cable-linkage hybrid hierarchically drive upper limb rehabilitation robot (HDURR) is proposed. Firstly, according to the force characteristics and physiological structure of the human upper limb, a cable decoupling method is proposed base on the drive hierarchical arrangement structure, and a hybrid drive method is applied in the rehabilitation robot to improve the cable traction force. Secondly, the kinematic model and dynamic model of the robot system are established to obtain the force mapping relationship of joint-cable-motor. Finally, the length of the flexible cables in different rehabilitation training modes and the driving torque in one of the rehabilitation training modes were analyzed. The results showed that the hierarchical drive has a good decoupling effect. Compared with the direct drive of the motors, the hybrid drive can increase the driving force by about 50 %, which verifies the rationality of the design and the validity of the method.</p>