Human Lower Limb Joint Biomechanics in Daily Life Activities: A Literature Based Requirement Analysis for Anthropomorphic Robot Design

Abstract

Daily human activity is characterized by a broad variety of movement tasks. This work summarizes the sagittal hip, knee, and ankle joint biomechanics for a broad range of daily movements, based on previously published literature, to identify requirements for robotic design. Maximum joint power, moment, angular velocity, and angular acceleration, as well as the movement-related range of motion and the mean absolute power were extracted, compared, and analyzed for essential and sportive movement tasks. We found that the full human range of motion is required to mimic human like performance and versatility. In general, sportive movements were found to exhibit the highest joint requirements in angular velocity, angular acceleration, moment, power, and mean absolute power. However, at the hip, essential movements, such as recovery, had comparable or even higher requirements. Further, we found that the moment and power demands were generally higher in stance, while the angular velocity and angular acceleration were mostly higher or equal in swing compared to stance for locomotion tasks. The extracted requirements provide a novel comprehensive overview that can help with the dimensioning of actuators enabling tailored assistance or rehabilitation for wearable lower limb robots, and to achieve essential, sportive or augmented performances that exceed natural human capabilities with humanoid robots.

An Analysis of Lower Limb Coordination Variability in Unilateral Tasks in Healthy Adults: A Possible Prognostic Tool

“…Therefore, the contributions of this study are: 1) assessing the linear interlimb coordination variability of participants in the three different functional tasks, 2) assessing the nonlinear interlimb coordination variability, 3) comparing the linear and nonlinear interlimb coordination variability of the participants in the functional tasks with increasing difficulty and complexity 4) assessing the effect of leg dominance on the shank-thigh coordination variability in the three different tasks. The three functional tasks in this study have been selected as they have similar knee extension-flexion motion and due to their application in clinical settings (McQuade and De Oliveira, 2011) (Jonsson and Kärrholm, 1994), as assessments of lowerlimb strength (Waldhelm et al, 2020), or due to their similarities to activities of daily living (Grimmer et al, 2020). The results of this study indicate that participants displayed different results in their linear and nonlinear coordination variability.…”

Lower limb joint biomechanics-based identification of gait transitions in between level walking and stair ambulation

“…On the other hand, technologies such as prostheses [ 6 , 7 ] or lower limb exoskeletons [ 8 – 11 ] can be used to regain the user’s ability of stair ambulation. Designing the hardware for these wearable lower limb robotics is likely to require the specification of the peak joint moments, the joint range of motion, and the average power [ 12 ]. Additionally, high-level robotic control requires information about the current and upcoming movement tasks.…”

Soft pneumatic elbow exoskeleton reduces the muscle activity, metabolic cost and fatigue during holding and carrying of loads

“…A cycle time of 1.5 s seems reasonable for a variety of load handling and manipulation tasks. However, different lifting techniques (e.g., squat, stoop) were found to require about 1.3 s 26 . At this point, it is unclear what the optimal torque assistance profiles should look like for such dynamic movements, and how much users could benefit from sub-optimal assistance torques.…”

“…Individuals with locomotion capabilities can instead use minimalistic and lightweight designs 22 , 23 , as additional weight in general, and especially increased weight at the limbs (inertia), will increase user effort 24 . Soft structures, as used in the exosuit concept 18 , 22 , 25 , seem promising to assist distal lower limb joints in daily tasks 26 . To minimize inertia-related increases of effort, exosuit actuators (motors) are placed near the body’s center of mass and Bowden cables are placed in parallel to the human muscles to transfer the assisting torques to the joints.…”