Despite recent developments in solutions to replace the missing limb of transfemoral amputees and restore natural locomotion, the use of these solutions remains limited. To date, the potential benefit of using powered prostheses is strongly impacted by the challenges that are yet to be addressed regarding their development, both on their design and control methods. An emerging trend for building the control strategies for the prostheses actuators takes advantage of bio-inspiration, i.e. the control laws rely on biological principles that have been highlighted in healthy locomotion. In this dissertation, bio-inspired control strategies for a powered transfemoral prosthesis are presented. The following biological concepts are explored throughout this work: (i) Central Pattern Generators (CPGs), which can be seen as a set of coupled oscillators responsible for providing the rhythmic characteristics of locomotion; (ii) motor primitives, which are considered to be the principal components of muscles stimulations; and (iii) the inverse internal models of the cerebellum, which plays an essential role in motor learning and adaptation. This dissertation presents three bio-inspired controllers for a representative compliant prosthesis equipped with series-elastic knee and ankle joints. The three control architectures rely on compliant position tracking by combining a feed-forward torque component with an impedance-based torque component for both joints of the prosthesis. The first controller simply incorporates reference torque and angle profiles associated to healthy walking that were taken from the literature, and it is mainly used to validate the feasibility of torque-based control strategies for the prosthesis without the need for torque sensing. The second version of the controller includes artificial, Gaussian-like torque and angular primitives which, through proper recombination, generate the reference torque and angle patterns for both joints. It also integrates an artificial CPG implemented by an adaptive ...
Design and evaluation of bio-inspired control strategies for transfemoral prosthesis
2021-01-01
Theses
Electronic Resource
English
DDC: | 629 |
An adaptive hybrid control architecture for an active transfemoral prosthesis
BASE | 2022
|Torque control of an active elastic transfemoral prosthesis via quasi-static modelling
BASE | 2018
|Compliant Control of a Transfemoral Prosthesis by combining Feed-Forward and Feedback
BASE | 2020
|BASE | 2020
|