Validation of an instrumented walkway designed for estimation of the ankle impedance in sagittal and frontal planes

Document Type

Conference Proceeding

Publication Date

1-1-2016

Abstract

Copyright © 2016 by ASME. Recently, the authors designed and fabricated an Instrumented Walkway for the estimation of the ankle mechanical impedance in the sagittal and frontal planes during walking in arbitrary directions [1]. It consists of a powered platform; therefore, the users do not need to wear or carry any measurement device or actuation system other than reflective markers used to record the ankle kinematics with a motion capture camera system. This paper describes the continuous development of the Instrumented Walkway and presents an experimental preliminary validation of its capability to estimate the impedance of a system with time-varying dynamics. To validate the system, a mockup with mechanical characteristics similar to a human lower-leg and controllable time-varying stiffness was used. The stiffness of the mockup was estimated with fixed and time-varying stiffness. With fixed stiffness, a stochastic system identification method was used to estimate the mockup's impedance. When the mockup presented a timevarying stiffness, a second order parametric model was used. The RMS error between the two methods was 2.81 Nm/rad (maximum 4.12 Nm/rad and minimum of -3.41 Nm/rad). The results show that the proposed approach can estimate the stiffness of systems with time-varying dynamics or static dynamics with similar accuracy. Since the setup was already validated for systems with time-invariant dynamics, it concluded the system's applicability for time-varying systems such as the human ankle-foot during the stance phase.

Publication Title

ASME 2016 Dynamic Systems and Control Conference, DSCC 2016

Link to Full Text

Share

COinS