Achieving compliance and flexibility under the premise of ensuring trajectory tracking performance and also reflecting the wearer’s movement intention, has not yet been well solved in the field of prosthesis. The aim of this paper is to provide a compliant, robust, and continuous control scheme for robotic knee prosthesis to solve the contradictory problems of trajectory tracking performance and compliance. The proposed scheme are based on the admittance model and radial basis function (RBF) neural network–enhanced nonsingular fast terminal sliding-mode controller (NFTSMC). The desired trajectory of the prosthetic knee joint is driven by humans and reshaped to reference trajectory by an admittance model, so that the prosthetic leg can reflect the human’s movement intention and being compliant. RBF neural network is introduced to achieve adaptive approximation of unknown models and ensure that the controller does not depend on the mathematical model of the “human-in-the-loop” prosthesis system. A novel NFTSMC was proposed to deal with the influence of ground reaction forces (GRFs) and fitting errors of the RBF neural network, which make the tracking error converge to zero in a finite time. The adaptive law of the RBF neural network is obtained by the Lyapunov method, and the stability and finite-time convergence of the closed-loop system are rigorously proved and analyzed mathematically. The simulation results prove the feasibility and effectiveness of the propose control scheme.

Intelligent lower-limb prosthesis appears in the public view due to its attractive and potential functions, which can help amputees restore mobility and return to normal life. To realize the natural transition of locomotion modes, locomotion mode classification is the top priority. There are mainly five steady-state and periodic motions, including LW (level walking), SA (stair ascent), SD (stair descent), RA (ramp ascent), and RD (ramp descent), while ST (standing) can also be regarded as one locomotion mode (at the start or end of walking). This paper mainly proposes four novel features, including TPDS (thigh phase diagram shape), KAT (knee angle trajectory), CPO (center position offset) and GRFPV (ground reaction force peak value) and designs ST classifier and artificial neural network (ANN) classifier by using a user-dependent dataset to classify six locomotion modes. Gaussian distributions are applied in those features to simulate the uncertainty and change of human gaits. An angular velocity threshold and GRFPV feature are used in the ST classifier, and the artificial neural network (ANN) classifier explores the mapping relation between our features and the locomotion modes. The results show that the proposed method can reach a high accuracy of 99.16% ± 0.38%. The proposed method can provide accurate motion intent of amputees to the controller and greatly improve the safety performance of intelligent lower-limb prostheses. The simple structure of ANN applied in this paper makes adaptive online learning algorithms possible in the future.

Intelligent lower-limb prostheses aims to make amputees walk more comfortably and symmetrically which requires the dynamic altering of gait parameters such as walking speed. Some solutions have been proposed such as direct integration and machine learning methods. The former updates walking speed once after an entire gait cycle and the latter collects large amounts of gait data which are unfriendly to lower-limb amputees. Only by using an inertial measurement unit (IMU) placed on the thigh, this paper proposes a novel online walking speed estimation method to determine the walking speed rapidly and accurately in real-time. A step frequency estimator based on the phase variable and a stride estimator based on the inverted pendulum model is designed to determine the walking speed together. The proposed method is evaluated on a public open-source dataset and the gait data were collected in the lab to verify the effectiveness for able-bodied and prosthetic wearers. The experiment results show that the walking speed estimator offers higher accuracy (RMSE of the able-bodied dataset: 0.051 ± 0.016 m/s, RMSE of the prosthetic wearers‘ dataset: 0.036 ± 0.021 m/s) than the previous works with a real-time frequency of 100 Hz. The results also show that the proposed method has good performances both in static speeds and dynamic speed tracking without much data collection before being applied.

Surface electromyography(sEMG) signals are used extensively in the study of lower limb locomotion, capturing and extracting information from various lower limb muscles as input for powered prostheses. Many transfemoral amputees have their lower limbs completely removed below the knee due to disease, accident or trauma. The patients only have the muscles of the thigh and cannot use the muscles of the lower leg as a signal source for sEMG. In addition, wearing sEMG sensors can cause discomfort to the wearer. Therefore, the number of sensors needs to be minimized while ensuring recognition accuracy. In this paper, we propose a novel framework to select the position of sensors and predict joint angles according to the sEMG signals from thigh muscles. Specifically, a method using ICA clustering is proposed to statistically analyze the similarity between muscles. Additionally, a mapping relationship between sEMG and lower limb joint angles is established by combining the BP network and phase variable method, compared with the mapping using only neural networks. The results show that the proposed method has higher estimation accuracy in most of the combinations. The best muscle combination is vastus lateralis (VL) + biceps femoris (BF) + gracilis (GC) (${\gamma }_{knee}$ = 0.989, ${\gamma }_{ankle}$ = 0.985). The proposed method will be applied to lower limb-powered prostheses for continuous bioelectric control.

A significant number of people in the world suffer from limb losses, while prosthesis is the hopeful way to help the amputees back to normal life. Recently, the most popular control method used in intelligent prosthesis is FSM-IC (finite state machine with impedance control), which requires a significant amount of manual parameter adjustments to achieve a good model compensation in a discrete way. Taking the lower-limb prosthesis as the research object, this paper applies an LWPR (locally weighted projection regression) model to learn the dynamic model of a prosthesis in real time in order to achieve a better model compensation in a continuous way and propose scientific experimental schemes to verify the control method. First, the basic control framework of lower-limb prosthesis is given. Then, the control law is derived on the basis of model building and LWPR’s addition. Finally, the proper experimental schemes are designed to carry out the control method effectively in a safe way. The experimental results show that the control law with the LWPR model can greatly improve the tracking performance during the swing phase and obtain rather good compliance during the stance phase. Moreover, the results also indicate that the LWPR model can approximate the dynamic model online. This method is hoped to be extended to more applications and fields.

The flight controllability and safety of unmanned compound rotorcraft are closely related to their aerodynamic characteristics. During forward flight, complex aerodynamic interference effects arise among the rotor, propeller, wing, fuselage, and horizontal–vertical tail. These interactions change dramatically with variations in forward speed, which may have a substantial impact on flight performance. This paper investigates aerodynamic interference related to the rotor, propeller, and fuselage of a sample unmanned compound rotorcraft with a novel configuration. On this basis, a flight dynamics model that incorporates the identified aerodynamic interference is formulated. Firstly, an analysis of rotor/propeller/fuselage aerodynamic interference is performed using the momentum source method (MSM). Subsequently, the aerodynamic models for the wing, fuselage, and horizontal–vertical tail are updated by integrating aerodynamic interference factors, leading to the development of a nonlinear flight dynamics model for the sample unmanned compound rotorcraft. Finally, to validate the updated flight dynamics model, numerical simulation results are systematically compared against wind tunnel test results. The results reveal a significant correlation between the numerical simulation data and wind tunnel test results, which indicates that the updated flight dynamics model possesses high accuracy and reliability and can characterize the dynamic characteristics of the sample unmanned compound rotorcraft within the flight speed envelope.