A Gait Analysis with Multibody Dynamics Toward Energy-Efficient Active Knee Prostheses

In general, prosthetic knee users have a large stress in the locomotion due to less smoothness and unnecessary energy consumption.In the passive prosthesis, it is difficult to regulate the stiffness depending on the ground contact force.In consideration of designs for such an adaptivity to improve passive systems, we propose an artificial knee kinematics design to absorb the redundant contact force for the smooth and stable walking and explore necessary constraints for the proposed mechanics to be able to have multi-functions not only for walking but also knee flexion accumulating the power for jumping.In the analysis, we used Multibody Dynamics (MBD) to investigate.This result will contribute to design an integrated dynamic model by incorporating a flexible body and ground contact forces in various purposes.