Elastic elements in prosthetic devices can help to reduce peak power (PP) and energy requirements (ER) for the actuators. Calculations showed that it is impossible with current commercial motor technology to mimic human ankle behavior in detail for higher walking and running speeds with single motor solutions using a Serial Elastic Actuator (SEA). Concerning this result we checked the requirements of a parallel elastic actuator (PEA) and a combination of serial and parallel (SE+PEA) springs. We found that a PEA can reduce PP additionally in comparison to the SEA by pre-loading the spring in the flight phase. This reduces also peak torque. But this loading needs additional energy so that the ER increase in comparison to the SEA. The SE+PEA concept can further decrease PP. With that, the ER are less than the PEA but higher than for the SEA. The results show less benefit for the PEA and the SE+PEA when a constant stiffness and a fixed parallel spring slack length is used for both gaits and all speeds. All concepts show that mimicking human ankle joint behavior in running and walking at higher speeds is still challenging for single motor devices.

A monoarticular series elastic actuator (SEA) reduces energetic and peak power requirements compared to a direct drive (DD) in active prosthetic ankle-foot design. Simulation studies have shown that similar advantages are possible for the knee joint. The aims of this paper were to investigate the advantages of a monoarticular SEA-driven hip joint and to quantify the energetic benefit of an SEA-driven leg (with monoarticular hip, knee and ankle SEAs), assuming that damping (negative power) is passively achieved. The hip SEA provided minor energetic advantages in walking (up to 29%) compared to the knee and the ankle SEA. Reductions in required peak power were observed only for speeds close to preferred walking speed (18% to 27%). No energetic advantages were found in running, where a DD achieved the best performance when optimizing for energy. Using an SEA at each leg joint in the sagittal plane reduced the positive work by 14% to 39% for walking and by 37% to 75% for running. When using an SEA instead of a DD, the contribution of the three leg joints to doing positive work changed: the knee contributed less and the hip more positive work. For monoarticular SEAs, the ankle joint motor did most of the positive work.

Human gait is the result of a complex and fascinating cooperation between different joints and segments in the lower extremity. This study aims at investigating the existence of this cooperation or the so-called synergy between the shank motion and the ankle motion. One potential use of this synergy is to develop the high level controllers for active foot prostheses/orthoses. The central point in this paper is to develop a high level controller that is able to continuously map shank kinematics (inputs) to ankle angles and torques (outputs). At the same time, it does not require speed determination, gait percent identification, switching rules, and look-up tables. Furthermore, having those targets in mind, an important part of this study is to determine which input type is required to achieve such targets. This should be fulfilled through using minimum number of inputs. To do this, the Gaussian process (GP) regression has been used to estimate the ankle angles and torques for 11 subjects at three walking speeds (0.5, 1, and 1.5 m/s) based on the shank angular velocity and angle. The results show that it is possible to estimate ankle motion based on the shank motion. It was found that the estimation achieved less quality with only shank angular velocity or angle, whereas the aggregated angular velocity and angle resulted in much higher output estimation quality. In addition, the estimation quality was acceptable for the speeds that there was a training procedure before and when it was tested for the untrained speeds, the estimation quality was not as acceptable as before. The pros and cons of the proposed method are investigated at different scenarios.

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