Data-Driven Impedance Control For Knee-Ankle Prostheses
The prevailing paradigm in lower-limb robotic prosthesis control is to use hand-designed controllers with heuristically tuned behaviors. While these approaches can be very effective, they are labor-intensive in both the design of the behaviors and in individualizing them to each individual at the point-of-care. In this work, we instead developed a data-driven control architecture that allowed the prosthesis to work over continuums of tasks without requiring manual tuning.
Learn more about our work in this video:
The main publication detailing this work can be found here in the IEEE Transactions on Robotics. We’ve also extended this approach to sit/stand and stair traversal.
During the development of the controller, we also created a treadmill-based simulation of a local hiking trail to highlight the incline-adaptability of our controller. Here is the video:
