Controlling Locomotion over Continuously Varying Activities for Agile Powered Prosthetic Legs

项目摘要 膝上截肢者通常很难用传统的假肢进行日常生活中的各种活动。 新兴的动力膝关节-脚踝假体具有能够恢复正常生物力学的马达，但这些 设备仅限于一小部分预定义的活动，必须由技术专家根据用户的需要进行调整 超过几个小时。这个项目的总体目标是模拟和控制人类在 不断变化的任务，设计灵活、动力的假体，几乎不需要调整。这个 在当前的动力腿中普遍使用不同的特定任务控制器是 将人类运动视为一组离散的活动的流行范式。有一个根本性的差距， 关于如何分析、建模和控制连续变化的运动的知识，这极大地限制了 动力假体的适应性和敏捷性。这个项目的中心假设是不断地 变化的活动可以由基于可测量的物理量的单个数学模型来表示 称为任务变量。这项拟议的项目将对理解人类如何 不断适应不同的活动和环境，对敏捷设计具有重要的技术意义， 用户同步动力型假肢，对动力型膝踝假肢的采用具有临床意义 改善社区步行能力的假肢。提出的人类运动模型将使新的 控制和适应环境的假肢战略，这符合联合国环境规划署的使命 NICHD/NCMRR设备和技术开发计划领域和NIBIB数学模型， 仿真和分析程序。这项工作的创新之处在于：1)持续的范式 对于挑战现有离散范例的可变运动活动，2)统一的任务控制 显著提高电动假肢灵活性的方法，以及3)部分自动化的 调整流程可显著减少配置动力膝所需的时间和技术专业知识- 脚踝假体。这种连续的任务范式将为研究人类提供新的方法和模型 跨任务和任务转换的移动。这一创新将解决控制中的一个关键障碍 目前将动力腿限制在一小部分活动上的技术，这些活动不能很好地推广到 用户。建议的控制范例在用户和活动之间的适应性将改变 假肢领域配备了新一代即插即用的动力腿，可用于社区行走。

PROJECT ABSTRACT Above-knee amputees often struggle to perform the varying activities of daily life with conventional prostheses. Emerging powered knee-ankle prostheses have motors that can restore normative biomechanics, but these devices are limited to a small set of pre-defined activities that must be tuned to the user by technical experts over several hours. The overall goal of this project is to model and control human locomotion over continuously varying tasks for the design of agile, powered prostheses that require little to no tuning. The universal use of different task-specific controllers in current powered legs is a direct consequence of the prevailing paradigm for viewing human locomotion as a discrete set of activities. There is a fundamental gap in knowledge about how to analyze, model, and control continuously varying locomotion, which greatly limits the adaptability and agility of powered prostheses. The central hypothesis of this project is that continuously varying activities can be represented by a single mathematical model based on measureable physical quantities called task variables. The proposed project will be scientifically significant to understanding how humans continuously adapt to varying activities and environments, technologically significant to the design of agile, user-synchronized powered prosthetic legs, and clinically significant to the adoption of powered knee-ankle prostheses for improved community ambulation. The proposed model of human locomotion will enable new prosthetic strategies for controlling and adapting to the environment, which aligns with the missions of the NICHD/NCMRR Devices and Technology Development program area and the NIBIB Mathematical Modeling, Simulation, and Analysis program. The innovation of this work is encompassed in 1) a continuous paradigm for variable locomotor activities that challenges the existing discrete paradigm, 2) a unified task control methodology that drastically improves the agility of powered prosthetic legs, and 3) a partially automated tuning process that significantly reduces the time and technical expertise required to configure powered knee- ankle prostheses. This continuous task paradigm will provide new methods and models for studying human locomotion across tasks and task transitions. This innovation will address a key roadblock in control technology that currently restricts powered legs to a small set of activities that do not generalize well across users. The adaptability of the proposed control paradigm across users and activities will transform the prosthetics field with a new generation of “plug-and-play” powered legs for community ambulation.