A Minimum Jerk Design of Active Artificial Foot

This paper deals with a modeling design of foot segment of lower limb prosthesis. An objective of the design is to provide smooth and active motion resembling that of human foot on gait. The foot motion was formulated as a two-boundary-value problem which calculus of variations was necessary to help determination of optimized solution. Minimum jerk was an optimization criterion used to determine and simulate the foot motion along foot-ground interface of gait by considering the active phase as a key. The simulations represented smooth and active foot motion resembling that of human foot in the smooth active phase of normal gait. These results supported using of minimum jerk to design foot actuating technique to enhance a smooth and active motion.