Neural-Dynamics Optimization and Repetitive Learning Control for Robotic Leg Prostheses

Rapid development in robotics and bionics makes it possible for robotic leg prostheses to help amputees while imposing challenges on duplicating the motion characteristics of the amputees’ healthy leg. One critical problem in prosthetic control is joint angle drift problem, that is, a repetitive motion trajectory in task space cannot guarantee that the generated motion trajectories in joint space are also repetitive. In order to solve this problem, in this article, we propose neural-dynamics optimization for robotic leg prostheses to generate the repetitive joint trajectories in real time. Our proposed method duplicates the self-selected walking speed of the amputees’ healthy leg. The online motion generation is formulated as a constrained quadratic programming (QP) optimization problem whose objective function adopts the kinetic energy and joint displacement performance criterion. The varying parameter convergent differential neural network is developed as a real-time QP solver which can globally converge to the optimal solution of the constrained QP problem. Then, a repetitive learning controller is designed for robotic leg prostheses to reduce the tracking errors while following the repetitive motion. Through the physical experiments on the developed two-degree-of-freedom robotic leg prosthesis worn on an amputee, the neural-dynamics optimization is substantiated to be a remedy of online motion generation, and the effectiveness of repetitive learning control for reducing the prosthetic tacking errors is verified.