Controlling Locomotion over Continuously Varying Activities for Agile Powered Prosthetic Legs

项目摘要 膝关节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。 新兴的动力膝踝假体具有可以恢复规范生物力学的电机，但这些电机 设备仅限于一小组预定义的活动，这些活动必须由技术专家根据用户进行调整 超过几个小时。该项目的总体目标是模拟和控制人类运动， 不断变化的任务，用于设计敏捷、有动力的假肢，几乎不需要调整。的 在电流供电支路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活动的流行范式。有一个根本的差距， 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 动力假肢的适应性和灵活性。这个项目的核心假设是， 变化的活动可以用基于可测量的物理量的单一数学模型来表示 称为任务变量。拟议中的项目将对理解人类如何 不断适应变化的活动和环境，在技术上对敏捷设计具有重要意义， 用户同步动力假肢，并在临床上有意义的采用动力膝踝关节 为改善社区残疾人状况而安装的假肢。所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，这与联合国的使命相一致。 NICHD/NCMRR设备和技术开发计划领域和NIBIB数学建模， 模拟和分析程序。这项工作的创新包含在1）一个连续的范式 对于挑战现有离散范式的可变运动活动，2）统一的任务控制 方法，大大提高了灵活性的动力假肢，和3）部分自动化 调整过程，大大减少了配置动力膝关节所需的时间和技术专长， 踝关节假体这种连续任务范式将为研究人类行为提供新的方法和模型 跨任务的移动和任务转换。这一创新将解决控制方面的一个关键障碍 一种技术，目前限制动力腿的一小部分活动，不能很好地推广到 用户.所提出的跨用户和活动的控制范例的适应性将改变 假肢领域的新一代“即插即用”的动力腿社区假肢。

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.