Design and Control of an Active Electrical Knee and Ankle Prosthesis

This paper presents an overview of the design and control of an electrically powered knee and ankle prosthesis. The prosthesis design incorporates two motor-driven ball screw units to drive the knee and ankle joints. A spring in parallel with the ankle motor unit is employed to decrease the power consumption and increase the torque output for a given motor size. The device's sensor package includes a custom load cell to measure the sagittal socket interface moment above the knee joint, a custom sensorized foot to measure the ground reaction force at the heel and ball of the foot, and commercial potentiometers and load cells to measure joint positions and torques. A finite-state based impedance control approach, previously developed by the authors, is used and experimental results on level treadmill walking are presented that demonstrate the potential of the device to restore normal gait. The experimental power consumption of the device projects a walking distance of 5.0 km at a speed of 2.8 km/hr with a lithium polymer battery pack.