Economic Design for a Reliable Prosthetic Arm

A fault-tolerant Wi-Fi-based architecture for a Modular Prosthetic Limb (MPL) is studied in this paper. The focus is first on the actuators’ controllers in the arm and a design technique is developed to reduce the maintenance costs as well as the cost of the arm’s supervisor module without compromising its reliability. This technique can also be used as an analysis tool. Another contribution of this paper is related to motor redundancy. It is shown (using Petri Nets) how to increase their lifetime while reducing the cost of the added redundancy.