Existing electronic skin (e-skin) sensing platforms are equipped to monitor physical parameters using power from batteries or near-field communication. For e-skins to be applied in the next generation of robotics and medical devices, they must operate wirelessly and be self-powered. However, despite recent efforts to harvest energy from the human body, self-powered e-skin with the ability to perform biosensing with Bluetooth communication are limited because of the lack of a continuous energy source and limited power efficiency. Here, we report a flexible and fully perspiration-powered integrated electronic skin (PPES) for multiplexed metabolic sensing in situ. The battery-free e-skin contains multimodal sensors and highly efficient lactate biofuel cells that use a unique integration of zero- to three-dimensional nanomaterials to achieve high power intensity and long-term stability. The PPES delivered a record-breaking power density of 3.5 milliwatt·centimeter−2 for biofuel cells in untreated human body fluids (human sweat) and displayed a very stable performance during a 60-hour continuous operation. It selectively monitored key metabolic analytes (e.g., urea, NH4+, glucose, and pH) and the skin temperature during prolonged physical activities and wirelessly transmitted the data to the user interface using Bluetooth. The PPES was also able to monitor muscle contraction and work as a human-machine interface for human-prosthesis walking.

Nonlinear control methodologies have successfully realized stable human-like walking on powered prostheses. However, these methods are typically restricted to model independent controllers due to the unknown human dynamics acting on the prosthesis. This paper overcomes this restriction by introducing the notion of a separable subsystem control law, independent of the full system dynamics. By constructing an equivalent subsystem, we calculate the control law with local information. We build a subsystem model of a general open-chain manipulator to demonstrate the control method's applicability. Employing these methods for an amputee-prosthesis model, we develop a model dependent prosthesis controller that relies solely on measurable states and inputs but is equivalent to a controller developed with knowledge of the human dynamics and states.

Lower leg prostheses could improve the life quality of amputees by increasing comfort and reducing energy to locomote, but currently control methods are limited in modulating behaviors based upon the human's experience. This paper describes the first steps toward learning complex controllers for dynamical robotic assistive devices. We provide the first example of behavioral cloning to control a powered transfemoral prostheses using a Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) based recurrent neural network (RNN) running on a custom hardware accelerator that exploits temporal sparsity. The RNN is trained on data collected from the original prosthesis controller. The RNN inference is realized by a novel EdgeDRNN accelerator in real-time. Experimental results show that the RNN can replace the nominal PD controller to realize endto-end control of the AMPRO3 prosthetic leg walking on flat ground and unforeseen slopes with comparable tracking accuracy. EdgeDRNN computes the RNN about 240 times faster than real time, opening the possibility of running larger networks for more complex tasks in the future. Implementing an RNN on this real-time dynamical system with impacts sets the ground work to incorporate other learned elements of the human-prosthesis system into prosthesis control.

This paper extends bipedal trajectory tracking methods to prostheses to enable construction of a class of model-dependent prosthesis controllers using locally available sensor information. The rapidly exponentially stabilizing control Lyapunov functions (RES-CLFs) developed for bipedal robots guarantee stability of the hybrid zero dynamics in the presence of impacts that occur in walking. These methods cannot be directly applied to prostheses because of the unknown human dynamics. We overcome this challenge with two RES-CLFs, one for the prosthesis subsystem and another for the remaining human system. Further, we outline a method to construct these RES-CLFs for this type of separable system by first constructing separable CLFs for partially feedback linearizable systems. This work develops a class of separable subsystem controllers that rely only on local information but provide formal guarantees of stability for the full hybrid system with zero dynamics.

No abstract