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Although the potential benefits of a powered ankle-foot prosthesis have been well documented, no one has successfully developed and verified that such a prosthesis can improve amputee gait compared to a conventional passive-elastic prosthesis. One of the main hurdles that hinder such a development is the challenge of building an ankle-foot prosthesis that matches the size and weight of the intact ankle, but still provides a sufficiently large instantaneous power output and torque to propel an amputee. In this paper, we present a novel, powered ankle-foot prosthesis that overcomes these design challenges. The prosthesis comprises an unidirectional spring, configured in parallel with a force-controllable actuator with series elasticity. With this architecture, the ankle-foot prosthesis matches the size and weight of the human ankle, and is shown to be satisfying the restrictive design specifications dictated by normal human ankle walking biomechanics.
Au et al. (Fri,) studied this question.
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