Although below-knee prostheses have been commercially available for some time, today's devices are completely passive, and consequently, their mechanical properties remain fixed with walking speed and terrain. A lack of understanding of the ankle-foot biomechanics and the dynamic interaction between an amputee and a prosthesis is one of the main obstacles in the development of a biomimetic ankle-foot prosthesis. In this paper, we present a novel ankle-foot emulator system for the study of human walking biomechanics. The emulator system is comprised of a high performance, force-controllable, robotic ankle-foot worn by an amputee interfaced to a mobile computing unit secured around his waist. We show that the system is capable of mimicking normal ankle-foot walking behaviour. An initial pilot study supports the hypothesis that the emulator may provide a more natural gait than a conventional passive prosthesis

The transformation from high level task specification to low level motion control is a fundamental issue in sensorimotor control in animals and robots. This paper describes a control scheme called virtual model control that addresses this issue. Virtual model control is a motion control language that uses simulations of imagined mechanical components to create forces, which are applied through real joint torques, thereby creating the illusion that the virtual components are connected to the robot. Due to the intuitive nature of this technique, designing a virtual model controller requires the same skills as designing the mechanism itself. A high level control system can be cascaded with the low level virtual model controller to modulate the parameters of the virtual mechanisms. Discrete commands from the high level controller would then result in fluid motion. Virtual model control has been applied to a physical bipedal walking robot. A simple algorithm utilizing a simple set of virtual components has successfully compelled the robot to walk continuously over level terrain.

Robots typically have an individual actuator at each joint which can result in a nonintuitive and difficult control problem. In this paper we present a control method in which the real joint actuators are used to mimic virtual actuators which can be more intuitive and hence make the control problem more straightforward. Our virtual actuator control method requires a solution to the force distribution problem when applied to parallel mechanisms. An extension of Gardner's partitioned actuator set control method (1991) is presented. This extended method allows for dealing with constrained degrees of freedom in which the torque cannot be specified but can be measured. A simulated hexapod robot was developed to test the proposed control method. The virtual actuators allowed textbook control solutions to be used in controlling this highly nonlinear, parallel mechanism. Using a simple linear control law, the robot walked while simultaneously balancing a pendulum and tracking an object.