Design and Control System of a New Hip-Knee Integrated Intelligent Prostheses

Prostheses are the only means to help amputees recover their ability to walk. Traditional hip disarticulation prostheses (HDP) are primarily of passive structures, which make it extremely difficult for amputees to operate the prostheses and will develop an abnormal gait. The research exhibits a new HDP that provides amputees with a natural gait that approximates the movement patterns of the human lower limb. The double parallelogram and four-bar structure were used to restore the movement patterns of the biological hip and knee joints, respectively. In addition, we designed a feedback control algorithm for the new prosthesis based on multi-sensor information fusion to achieve joint angle tracking and control. The experimental results show that the new HDP hip and knee joint angle change trend was the same as the biological joints, and the faster the step speed, the more similar to the biological joints. Therefore, the new HDP can better restore the co-movement pattern of human lower limb joints, promising to help amputees recover their natural gait.