A De-risked Bio-inspired Condylar Prosthetic Knee Joint for a Robotic Leg Test Rig

Abstract

The design of the human knee joint has been a challenging task due to the presence of intricate parts, complex mechanisms and their interdependence which joins them together. A bio-inspired design for the condylar knee joint has been proposed in earlier publications [1], [2]. However, the manufacturing limitation of the design was not considered. This paper introduces a de-risked and optimised design through the use of standard design and manufacturing techniques based on the gathered data from a robotics leg test bench. Moreover, this paper presents an optimised design derived from a state-of-the-art artificial intelligence tool. The optimized design using conventional methods is tested against real-world loading conditions during finite element analysis and the results are presented.