Development of control logic for simultaneous actuators by using sequential systems in electromechanical prosthesis

The state of the art and already on market electromechanical prosthesis are mostly implemented by using the sequential movement of actuators, which give extra load to each other during movement. As a solution to this problem, some of the newest prosthesis (mostly in development) use simultaneous movement of actuators instead, which increase their overall load capacity and their DOF. However, backbones of mostly newest electromechanical prosthetics are microcontrollers, which are sequential by nature. Therefore, implementing simultaneous movement of actuators using sequential systems is not an easy task to do. In this article, we propose a simultaneous control logic based on interrupts. Proposed implementation performance is then being tested by using an electromechanical arm prosthesis of 3 DOF developed at CINVESTAV Mexico. Proposed testing bench uses brushless DC servomotors as actuators, a 16-bit architecture platform, and standard C modular coding for embedded systems. At the end of this article, we account, summarize and discuss about movement effectiveness of the proposed testing bench.