Active lower-limb prostheses could enable more natural assisted locomotion by contributing net positive work through important gait events, such as ankle push-off. 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. In particular, we leverage model-based control approaches for dynamic bipedal robotic walking to develop a systematic method to realize human-like walking on a powered prosthesis that does not require subject- specific tuning. The proposed controller is implemented on a prosthesis for 2 subjects without tuning between subjects, emulating subject-specific human kinematic trends on the prosthesis joints. These experimental results demonstrate that our force- based nonlinear control approach achieves better tracking of human-like kinematic trajectories, with an average RMSE of 0.0223 during weight-bearing, compared to 2 non-force-sensing methods with an average RMSE of 0.0411 and 0.0430.

Current lower-limb prosthesis control methods are primarily model-independent — lacking formal guarantees of stability, relying largely on heuristic tuning parameters for good performance, and neglecting use of the natural dynamics of the system. Model-dependence for prosthesis controllers is difficult to achieve due to the unknown human dynamics. We build upon previous work which synthesized provably stable prosthesis walking through the use of rapidly exponentially stabilizing control Lyapunov functions (RES-CLFs). This paper utilizes RES-CLFs together with force estimation to construct model-based optimization-based controllers for the prosthesis. These are experimentally realized on hardware with onboard sensing and computation. This hardware demonstration has formal guarantees of stability, utilizes the natural dynamics of the system, and achieves superior tracking to other prosthesis trajectory tracking control methods.

This paper presents and experimentally implements three different adaptive and robust adaptive controllers as the first steps toward using model-based controllers for transfemoral prostheses. The goal of this paper is to translate these control methods to the robotic domain, from bipedal robotic walking to prosthesis walking, including a rigorous stability analysis. The human/prosthesis system is first modeled as a two-domain hybrid asymmetric system. An optimization problem is formulated to obtain a stable human-like gait. The proposed controllers are then developed for the combined human/prosthesis model and the optimized reference gait. The stability of all three controllers is proven using the Lyapunov stability theorem, ensuring convergence to the desired gait. The proposed controllers are first verified on a bipedal walking robot as a hybrid human/prosthesis model in simulation. They are then experimentally tested on a treadmill with an able-bodied subject using third iteration of AMBER Prosthetic (AMPRO3), a custom self-contained powered transfemoral prosthesis. Finally, outdoor tests are carried out using AMPRO3 with three test subjects walking on level ground, uphill slopes, and downhill slopes at slope angles of 3° and 8°, to demonstrate walking in different real-world environments.

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 data collected from the original prosthesis controller. The RNN inference is realized by a novel EdgeDRNN accelerator in real-time. Experimental results show that the RNN can replace the nominal PD controller to realize end-to-end control of the AMPRO3 prosthetic leg walking on flat ground and unforeseen slopes with comparable tracking accuracy. EdgeDRNN computes the RNN about 240 times faster than real time, opening the possibility of running larger networks for more complex tasks in the future. Implementing an RNN on this real-time dynamical system with impacts sets the ground work to incorporate other learned elements of the human-prosthesis system into prosthesis control.

This paper proposes a data-driven method for powered prosthesis control that achieves stable walking without the need for additional sensors on the human. The key idea is to extract the nominal gait and the human interaction information from motion capture data, and reconstruct the walking behavior with a dynamic model of the human-prosthesis system. The walking behavior of a human wearing a powered prosthesis is obtained through motion capture, which yields the limb and joint trajectories. Then a nominal trajectory is obtained by solving a gait optimization problem designed to reconstruct the walking behavior observed by motion capture. Moreover, the interaction force profiles between the human and the prosthesis are recovered by simulating the model following the recorded gaits, which are then used to construct a force tube that covers all the interaction force profiles. Finally, a robust Control Lyapunov Function (CLF) Quadratic Programming (QP) controller is designed to guarantee the convergence to the nominal trajectory under all possible interaction forces within the tube. Simulation results show this controller's improved tracking performance with a perturbed force profile compared to other control methods with less model information.