A Cadaveric Robotic Gait Simulator with Fuzzy Logic Vertical Ground Reaction Force Control

Lower limb dynamic cadaveric gait simulators are useful to investigate the biomechanics of the foot and ankle but many systems, including earlier versions of ours, have several common limitations including, simplified tibial kinematics [1-4], greatly reduced velocities [1-4], and open loop trial and error vertical ground reaction force (vGRF) control [1, 2, 4]. To address these limitations, we have developed a high fidelity robotic gait simulator (RGS) capable of simulating the stance phase of gait by prescribing 6-degrees of freedom (DOF) tibial kinematics at biomechanically more realistic velocities, while controlling the vGRF via a novel multiple input multiple output (MIMO) fuzzy logic vGRF controller.