Characterizing Prosthesis Control Fault During Human-Prosthesis Interactive Walking Using Intrinsic Sensors

The physical interactions between wearable lower limb robots and humans have been investigated to inform effective robot design for walking augmentation. However, human-robot interactions when internal faults occur within robots have not been systematically reported, but it is essential to improve the robustness of robotic devices and ensure the user’s safety. This letter aims to (1) present a methodology to characterize the behavior of the robotic transfemoral prosthesis as an effective wearable robot platform while interacting with the users in the presence of internal faults, and (2) identify the potential data sources for accurate detection of the prosthesis fault. We first obtained the human perceived response in terms of their walking stability when the prosthesis control fault (inappropriate intrinsic control output/command) was emulated/applied in level-ground walking. Then the measurements and their features, obtained from the transfemoral prosthesis, were examined for the emulated faults that elicited a sense of instability in human users. The optimal features that contributed the most in separating faulty interaction from the normal walking condition were determined using two machine-learning-based approaches: One-Class Support Vector Machine (OCSVM) and Mahalanobis Distance (MD) classifier. The OCSVM anomaly detector could achieve an average sensitivity of 85.7% and an average false alarm rate of 1.7% with a reasonable detecting time of 147.6 ms for detecting emulated control errors among all subjects. The result demonstrates the potential of using machine-learning-based schemes in identifying prosthesis control faults based on intrinsic sensors on the prosthesis. This study presents a procedure to study human-robot fault tolerance and inform the future design of robust prosthesis control.