Robotic prosthesis control

Robotic prosthesis control is a method for controlling a prosthesis in such a way that the controlled robotic prosthesis restores a biologically accurate gait to a person with a loss of limb.[1] This is special branch of control that has an emphasis on the interaction between humans and robotics.

Background

Basic control block diagram used in the designing of controllers for a system.

Back in the 1970 several researchers developed a tethered electrohydraulic transfemoral prosthesis.[2][3][4][5][6][7] It only included a hydraulically actuated knee joint controlled by off-board electronics using a type of control called echo control.[4] Echo control tries to take the kinematics from the sound leg and control the prosthetic leg to match the intact leg when it reaches that part of the gait cycle.[3] In 1988 a battery-powered active knee joint powered by DC motors and controlled by a robust position tracking control algorithm was created by Popovic and Schwirtlich.[8][9] Tracking control is a common method of control used to force a particular state, such as position, velocity, or torque, to track a particular trajectory. These are just two examples of previous work that has been done in this field.

Lower limb control

Impedance control

This form of control is an approach used to control the dynamic interactions between the environment and a manipulator.[10] This works by treating the environment as an admittance and the manipulator as the impedance.[11] The relationship this imposes for robotic prosthesis the relationship in between force production in response to the motion imposed by the environment. This translates into the torque required at each joint during a single stride, represented as a series of passive impedance functions piece wise connected over a gait cycle.[10] Impedance control doesn't regulate force or position independently, instead it regulates the relationship between force and position and velocity. To Design an impedance controller, a regression analysis of gait data is used to parameterize an impedance function. For lower limb prosthesis the impedance function looks similar to the following equation.[12]

Hugh Herr demonstrating new robotic prosthetic legs at TED 2014: "That was the first demonstration of a running gait under neural command. The more I fire my muscles, the more torque I get."

The terms k (spring stiffness), θ0 (equilibrium angle), and b (dampening coefficient) are all parameters found through regression and tuned for different parts of the gait cycle and for a specific speed. This relationship is then programed into a micro controller to determine the required torque at different parts of the walking phase.

Myoelectric control

Electromyography (EMG) is a technique used for evaluating and recording the electrical activity produced by skeletal muscles.[13] Advanced pattern recognition algorithms can take these recordings and decode the unique EMG signal patterns generated by muscles during specific movements. The patterns can be used to determine the intent of the user and provide control for a prosthetic limb.[14] For lower limb robotic prosthesis it is important to be able to determine if the user wants to walk on level ground, up a slope, or up stairs. Currently this is where myoelectric control comes intro play. During transitions between these different modes of operation EMG signal becomes highly variable and can be used to compliment information from mechanical sensors to determine the intended mode of operation.[14] Each patient that uses a robotic prosthesis that is tuned for this type of control has to have there system trained for them specifically. This is done by have them go through the different modes of operation and using that data to train there pattern recognition algorithm.[14]

Speed-adaptation mechanism

The speed-adaption mechanism is a mechanism used to determine the required torque from the joints at different moving speeds.[1] During the stance phase it is has been seen that quasistiffness, which is the derivative of the torque angle relationship with respect the angle, changes constantly as a function of walking speed.[1] This means that over the stance phase, depending on the speed the subject is moving, there is a derivable torque angle relationship that can be used to control a lower limb prosthesis. During the swing phase joint torque increases proportionally to walking speed and the duration of the swing phase decreases proportionally to the stride time.[1] These properties allow for trajectories to be derived that can be controlled around that accurately describe the angle trajectory over the swing phase. Because these two mechanism remain constant from person to person this method removes the speed and patient specific tuning required by most lower limb prosthetic controllers.[1]

Model-independent quadratic programs (MIQP)+Impedance control

Walking gait is classified as hybrid system, meaning that it has split dynamics. With this unique problem, a set of solutions to hybrid systems that undergo impacts was developed called Rapid Exponentially Stabilizing Control Lyapunov Functions(RES-CLF).[15] Control Lyapunov function are used to stabilize a nonlinear system to a desired set of states. RES-CLFs can be realized using quadratic programs that take in several inequality constraints and return an optimal output.[15] One problem with these are that they require a model of the system to develop the RES-CLFs. To remove the need of tuning to specific individuals Model Independent Quadratic Programs (MIQP) were used to derive CLFs. These CLFs are only focused on reducing the error in the desired output without any knowledge of what the desired torque should be. To provide this information an impedance control is added to provide a feed forward term that allows the MIQP to gather information about the system it is controlling without having a full model of the system.[15]

Upper limb control

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References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 Lenzi, Tommaso, L. Hargrove, and J. Sensinger. "Speed-adaptation mechanism: Robotic prostheses can actively regulate joint torque." Robotics & Automation Magazine, IEEE 21.4 (2014): 94-107.
  2. ↑ Stein, J. L. and Flowers, W. C. (1988). Stance phase control of above-knee prostheses: knee control versus SACH foot design. Journal of Biomechanics, 20(1): 19–28.
  3. 1 2 Grimes, D. L. (1979). An active multi-mode above knee prosthesis controller. PhD Thesis, Cambridge, MA, MIT, Department of Mechanical Engineering.
  4. 1 2 Grimes, D. L., Flowers, W. C. and Donath, M. (1977). Feasibility of an active control scheme for above knee prostheses. ASME Journal of Biomechanical Engineering, 99(4): 215–221.
  5. ↑ Flowers, W. C., and Mann, R. W. (1977). Electrohydraulic knee-torque controller for a prosthesis simulator. ASME Journal of Biomechanical Engineering, 99(4): 3–8.
  6. ↑ Donath, M. (1974). Proportional EMG control for above-knee prosthesis. Master’s Thesis Cambridge, MA, MIT, Department of Mechanical Engineering
  7. ↑ Flowers, W. C. (1973). A man-interactive simulator system forabove-kneeprostheticsstudies.PhDThesis,Cambridge, MA, MIT, Department of Mechanical Engineering.
  8. ↑ Popovic, D. and Schwirtlich, L. (1988). Belgrade active A/K prosthesis. Electrophysiological Kinesiology (International Congress Series, No. 804), de Vries, J. (ed.). Amsterdam, Excerpta Medica, pp. 337–343
  9. ↑ Au, S., Bonato, P.and Herr, H. (2005).An EMG-position controlled system for an active ankle-foot prosthesis: an initial experimental study. Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Rehabilitation Robotics, pp. 375–379
  10. 1 2 Aghasadeghi, Navid, et al. "Learning impedance controller parameters for lower-limb prostheses." Intelligent robots and systems (IROS), 2013 IEEE/RSJ international conference on. IEEE, 2013.
  11. ↑ Hogan, Neville. "Impedance control: An approach to manipulation." American Control Conference, 1984. IEEE, 1984.
  12. ↑ Sup, Frank, Amit Bohara, and Michael Goldfarb. "Design and control of a powered transfemoral prosthesis." The International journal of robotics research 27.2 (2008): 263-273.
  13. ↑ Kamen, Gary. Electromyographic Kinesiology. In Robertson, DGE et al. Research Methods in Biomechanics. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics Publ., 2004.
  14. 1 2 3 Hargrove LJ; Young AJ; Simon AM; et al. (2015-06-09). "Intuitive control of a powered prosthetic leg during ambulation: A randomized clinical trial". JAMA. 313 (22): 2244–2252. doi:10.1001/jama.2015.4527. ISSN 0098-7484.
  15. 1 2 3 Zhao, Huihua; Reher, Jake; Horn, Jonathan; Paredes, Victor; Ames, Aaron D. (2015-01-01). "Realization of Nonlinear Real-time Optimization Based Controllers on Self-contained Transfemoral Prosthesis". Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE Sixth International Conference on Cyber-Physical Systems. ICCPS '15. New York, NY, USA: ACM: 130–138. doi:10.1145/2735960.2735964. ISBN 9781450334556.
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