Human Lower Limb Joint Biomechanics in Daily Life Activities: A Literature Based Requirement Analysis for Anthropomorphic Robot Design

Abstract

Daily human activity is characterized by a broad variety of movement tasks. This work summarizes the sagittal hip, knee, and ankle joint biomechanics of a broad range of daily movements, based on previously published literature, to identify the most demanding movements. The analysis should help to improve the dimensioning of drivetrains for wearable lower limb robotics and humanoid robots with human-like movement capabilities. Daily human activity is characterized by a broad variety of movement tasks. This work summarizes the sagittal hip, knee, and ankle joint biomechanics for a broad range of daily movements, based on previously published literature, to identify requirements for robotic design. Maximum joint power, moment, angular velocity, and angular acceleration, as well as the movement-related range of motion and the mean absolute power were extracted, compared, and analyzed for essential and sportive movement tasks. We found that the full human range of motion is required to mimic human like performance and versatility. In general, sportive movements were found to exhibit the highest joint requirements in angular velocity, angular acceleration, moment, power, and mean absolute power. However, at the hip, essential movements, such as recovery, had comparable or even higher requirements. Further, we found that the moment and power demands were generally higher in stance, while the angular velocity and angular acceleration were mostly higher or equal in swing compared to stance for locomotion tasks. The extracted requirements provide a novel comprehensive overview that can help with the dimensioning of actuators enabling tailored assistance or rehabilitation for wearable lower limb robots, and to achieve essential, sportive or augmented performances that exceed natural human capabilities with humanoid robots.