DimRad: A Radar-Based Perception System for Prosthetic Leg Barrier Traversing
This addresses mobility challenges for lower extremity amputees by providing an embedded perception solution for powered prosthetic legs, representing an incremental improvement in assistive technology.
The paper tackles the problem of enabling prosthetic legs to autonomously traverse obstacles like staircases by developing a radar-based perception system that localizes stair corners and estimates dimensions with an accuracy of 1 cm.
Lower extremity amputees face challenges in natural locomotion, which is partially compensated using powered assistive systems, e.g., micro-processor controlled prosthetic leg. In this paper, a radar-based perception system is proposed to assist prosthetic legs for autonomous obstacle traversing, focusing on multiple-step staircases. The presented perception system is composed of a radar module operating with a multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) configuration to localize consecutive stair corners. An inertial measurement unit (IMU) is integrated for coordinates correction due to the angular dis-positioning that occurs because of the knee angular motion. The captured information from both sensors is used for staircase dimensioning (depth and height). A shallow neural network (NN) is proposed to model the error due to the hardware limitations and enhance the dimension estimation accuracy (1 cm). The algorithm is implemented on a microcontroller subsystem of the radar kit to qualify the perception system for embedded integration in powered prosthetic legs.