A Pneumatic Artificial Muscle Articulated Knee Prosthesis

This paper describes the mechanical design and control approach for an above-knee (AK) prosthesis actuated by pneumatic artificial muscle. Pneumatic artificial muscle (PAM) affords great potential in prosthetics, since this type of actuator features a high power density, and similar characteristics to human muscles. However, there is no application of PAM in AK prosthetics in existing literature to the best knowledge of the authors. In this paper, a design of the prosthesis is presented, which provides sufficient actuation torque for the knee joint in energy consuming locomotive functions such as fast walking and stair climbing. The corresponding control approach is developed to mimic the human motor control in locomotive functions, which includes a lower-level equilibrium-point hypothesis-inspired motion controller, and a higher-level joint-behavior-based motion planner.