Optimal Design of a Geared Five-Bar Prosthetic Knee Considering Motion Interference

The prosthetic knee is the essential rehabilitation device for the above-knee amputees to recover from mobility impairments. This paper presents an optimal design of a geared-five bar (GFB) prosthetic knee considering the motion interference between its mechanism and internal actuating area. To ensure that the GFB prosthetic knee can provide the amputees with the expected knee centrode while there is no internal motion interference during knee flexion, the motion interference is solved by the separating axis theorem and added into the optimization process as the penalty function. The final optimization result shows that the centrode of the GFB prosthetic knee is close to the ideal one and the internal cavity for the actuation is guaranteed, which will be beneficial to the realization of the miniaturization of the powered geared five-bar prosthetic knee.