Team members:
- Sammit Adhya
- Matt Corne
- Thaine Hock
- Luz Quinonez
The goal of our project will be to design and build the controlling electronics for a six-axis robotic arm that can be controlled through the use of simple finger motions. The purpose of the project would be to create an arm that will allow paraplegics who have retained or regained mobility of their fingers to control the entire robotic arm in three dimensions to pick up and move objects. The device we propose to build will be a proof of concept of a larger scale device as well as a training system to learn to use a larger more practical arm that would use the same type of control, but could be mounted on and used with a power chair.
The most important part of our project is to control the arm with the use of only basic finger movement using a glove-like device. The next part will be to integrate features such as machine vision and automated control of the arm to improve the system. The final product will function as follows:
- Having blocks initially stacked neatly, allow user to move blocks to a pattern seen on the table and then evaluate performance based on accuracy and time.
- If the user finishes or ends the session, the computer will use sensors to locate block positions and move them to their original position using the robotic arm.
The project will be divided into four parts, distributed among four group members:
- The design of a microcontroller board that will process the user's glove input and output appropriate robotic arm maneuvering commands.
- Integration of position data captured from the sensors to the main processing board and development of algorithms to locate all the blocks in the given area.
- Development of arm controlling algorithms as well as all needed arm controlling hardware.
- Development of the hardware and any necessary software elements needed to accurately detect the user's finger movements in the glove-like device.