Spinal injuries are common and the result too often is that a young, healthy, athletic person is paralyzed from some point downwards. The muscles and the nerves below the injury are not injured, and one has to believe that if we could artificially activate the nerves then we could allow the person to regain some control over their body. In order to accomplish this, we must understand the mechanics of the human body and the innerration of the muscle. In large, this is a monumental task and one that will take years if not centuries to accomplish. However, there is research ongoing that is able, in small ways, to accomplish this control. In this paper, the problem of controlling the ankle joint moment is considered. The ankle is critical to upright stance. Just recall how hard it is to function when one badly sprains an ankle. The muscles that control the moments of the ankle are identified and are modeled in Hammerstien form as a static recruitment nonlinearity followed by a linear transfer function. A linear-quadratic-Gaussian optimal controller design procedure, based on polynomial equation approach, is proposed and verified experimentally.