OBJECTIVES
The aim of the CYBERLEGs project is to develop an artificial cognitive system for
trans-femoral amputees’ lower-limb functional replacement and assistance.
CYBERLEGs wants to research ways of cognitive control, motivated and validated
trough the ortho-prosthesis scenario, of a multi-degree-of-freedom system with both
lower-limb replacing and assistive capacities. The project will develop know-how on
how human can interface a semi-autonomous robotic device which supports the
amputee in executing locomotion-related tasks (e.g. walking, stairs climbing),
including transients (e.g. start, stop, sit-to-stand, etc. …), in a real life unstructured
environment. Research activities within CYBERLEGs aim at pursuing metabolic,
cognitive and energy efficiency. CYBERLEGs will be built with the aim of decreasing
the cardiovascular and muscular load on the amputee, to allow the user to use the
robotic aid on a whole-day basis (metabolic efficiency).
More specifically the scientific and technological challenges of the CYBERLEGs project
are:
• To design and develop a powered, wearable, energy- efficient lower-limb orthoprosthesis with tuneable passive compliant joints allowing passive energy transfer from knee to ankle joint.
• To develop a model based on motor primitives capturing human behaviour while executing locomotion-related tasks.
• To transpose the primitive-based model into a controller for CYBERLEGs, expected to work in symbiosis with the human used and make the control simple and intuitive.
• To develop a multi-sensory fusion algorithm for extracting the amputee motor intention from a multi-modal sensory system.
• To investigate a strategy for recognizing and preventing the incipient fall of the amputee.
• To develop a feedback strategy to augment the perception of CYBERLEGs as a part of the amputee’s body.
• To perform a comparative study in a real-life scenario in which CYBERLEGs performance is evaluated against other state-of-art solutions.
News
CYBERLEGs WILL BE ABLE TO:
• Infer the amputee motor intention – and, then, to use it to control both prosthesis and orthosis – by processing the information coming from the
human-robot interface;
• Detect when the amputee is stumbling and provide assistance for preventing the incipient fall;
• Evaluate possible amputee psychophysiological stress condition and on-line adapt the assistance strategy, as well as the gait pattern
• Provide the user with an augmented efferent feedback on the amputee-CYBERLEGs status, thus promoting the emergence of a sense of body-ownership (cognitive efficiency).
Finally, the hardware will employ state-of-the-art and beyond solutions to reach extreme energy efficiency with the ultimate goal of allowing the user to recharge only once a day (energy efficiency).
