Impedance controllers are popularly used in the field of lower limb prostheses and exoskeleton development. Such controllers assume the joint to be a spring-damper system described by a discrete set of equilibria and impedance parameters. Said parameters are estimated via a least squares optimization that minimizes the difference between the controller's output torque and human joint torque. Other researchers have used perturbation studies to determine empirical values for ankle impedance. The resulting values vary greatly from the prior least squares estimates. While perturbation studies are more credible, they require immense investment. This paper extended the least squares approach to reproduce the results of perturbation studies. The resulting impedance parameters were successfully tested on a powered transfemoral prosthesis, AMPRO II. Further, the paper investigated the effect of multiple equilibria on the least square estimation and the performance of the impedance controller. Finally, the paper uses the proposed least squares optimization method to estimate knee impedance.
Southern University of Science and Technology（南方科技大学）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）
Gait phase-based control is a trending research topic for walking-aid robots, especially robotic lower-limb prostheses. Gait phase estimation is a challenge for gait phase-based control. Previous researches used the integration or the differential of the human's thigh angle to estimate the gait phase, but accumulative measurement errors and noises can affect the estimation results. In this paper, a more robust gait phase estimation method is proposed using a unified form of piecewise monotonic gait phase-thigh angle models for various locomotion modes. The gait phase is estimated from only the…
North Carolina State University（北卡罗来纳州立大学）；University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill（北卡罗来纳大学教堂山分校）
Existing robotic lower-limb prostheses use autonomous control to address cyclic, locomotive tasks, but they are inadequate to operate the prosthesis for daily activities that are non-cyclic and unpredictable. To address this challenge, this study aims to design a novel electromyography (EMG)-driven musculoskeletal model for volitional control of a robotic ankle-foot prosthesis. This controller places the user in continuous control of the device, allowing them to freely manipulate the prosthesis behavior at will. The Hill-type muscle model was used to model a dorsiflexor and a plantarflexor, wh…
Institute of Neuroinformatics, University of Zurich（苏黎世大学神经信息学研究所）；ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；California Institute of Technology（加州理工学院）
Lower leg prostheses could improve the life quality of amputees by increasing comfort and reducing energy to locomote, but currently control methods are limited in modulating behaviors based upon the human's experience. This paper describes the first steps toward learning complex controllers for dynamical robotic assistive devices. We provide the first example of behavioral cloning to control a powered transfemoral prostheses using a Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) based recurrent neural network (RNN) running on a custom hardware accelerator that exploits temporal sparsity. The RNN is trained on da…
University of Texas at Dallas（德克萨斯大学达拉斯分校）；San Francisco State University（旧金山州立大学）；University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center（德克萨斯大学西南医学中心）
Although there has been recent progress in control of multi-joint prosthetic legs for rhythmic tasks such as walking, control of these systems for non-rhythmic motions and general real-world maneuvers is still an open problem. In this article, we develop a new controller that is capable of both rhythmic (constant-speed) walking, transitions between speeds and/or tasks, and some common volitional leg motions. We introduce a new piecewise holonomic phase variable, which, through a finite state machine, forms the basis of our controller. The phase variable is constructed by measuring the thigh an…
End-to-End Control of a Powered Knee-Ankle Prosthesis Towards Unified, Tuning-Free Assistance
Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）；Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering（伍德拉夫机械工程学院）；Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines（机器人与智能机器研究所）
Ankle push-off largely contributes to limb energy generation in human walking, leading to smoother and more efficient locomotion. Providing this net positive work to an amputee requires an active prosthesis, but has the potential to enable more natural assisted locomotion. To this end, this paper uses multi-contact models of locomotion together with force-based nonlinear optimization-based controllers to achieve human-like kinematic behavior, including ankle push-off, on a powered transfemoral prosthesis for 2 subjects. In particular, we leverage model-based control approaches for dynamic bipe…
Control of Powered Ankle-Foot Prostheses on Compliant Terrain: A Quantitative Approach to Stability Enhancement
Mechanical Engineering Department, at the University of Delaware（德克萨斯大学达勒姆分校机械工程系）；Mechanical Engineering Department, at the Rice University（赖斯大学机械工程系）
Arizona State University（亚利桑那州立大学）；North Carolina State University（北卡罗来纳州立大学）；University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill（北卡罗来纳大学教堂山分校）
We address a state-of-the-art reinforcement learning (RL) control approach to automatically configure robotic prosthesis impedance parameters to enable end-to-end, continuous locomotion intended for transfemoral amputee subjects. Specifically, our actor-critic based RL provides tracking control of a robotic knee prosthesis to mimic the intact knee profile. This is a significant advance from our previous RL based automatic tuning of prosthesis control parameters which have centered on regulation control with a designer prescribed robotic knee profile as the target. In addition to presenting the…
