Abstract
The last decades, rehabilitation has become a challenging context for mechatronical engineering. From the state-of-the-art it is seen that the field of prosthetics offers very promising perspectives to roboticist. Today’s prosthetic feet tend to improve amputee walking experience by delivering the necessary push-off forces while walking. Therefore, several new types of (compliant) actuators are developed in order to fulfill the torque and power requirements of a sound ankle-foot complex with minimized power consumption. At the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, the Robotics and Multibody Mechanics research group puts a lot of effort in the design and development of new bionic feet. In 2013, the Ankle Mimicking Prosthetic (AMP-) Foot 2, as a proof-of-concept, showed the advantage of using the explosive elastic actuator capable of delivering the full ankle torques (pm 120 Nm) and power (pm 250 W) with only a 60 W motor. In this article, the authors present the AMP-Foot 3, using an improved actuation method and using two locking mechanisms for improved energy storage during walking. The article focusses on the mechanical design of the device and validation of its working principle.
Highlights
The past decades, researchers have been studying pathological and non-pathological gait to understand the human ankle-foot function during walking
During the first experiment, Mr A was asked to walk at self selected speed with his own prosthesis in order to compare with his self selected speed wearing the Ankle Mimicking Prosthetic (AMP-)Foot 3
According to Mr A., he felt more comfortable while walking thanks to the change in rest position of the PF spring in the first phases of gait and the fact the AMP-Foot 3 is an efficient energy storing and returning (ESR) foot when used in passive mode compared to his own Modular III
Summary
The past decades, researchers have been studying pathological and non-pathological gait to understand the human ankle-foot function during walking. These efforts resulted in the development of new lower limb prosthetic devices aiming at raising the 3C-level (control, comfort and cosmetics) of amputees, each with slightly different characteristics. Thanks to the technological advances in computer aided design (CAD) and mechatronics, challenges in this field have become an important source of interest for roboticists. Pioneers in the field are undoubtedly the research teams of Herr et al (MIT—USA) [10,11,12], Sugar et al (ASU—USA) [13,14,15] and Goldfarb et al (Vanderbilt) [16, 17]. 2 companies have emerged from these research centers, namely iWalk
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