Robot Arm Human Arm!

Inspiration

Harrison and I did robotics together in high school, and we've missed it ever since! So the love of robotics was the first part. The second part was my exposure to the work of the Integrate Neuroprothesis Lab here at Texas A&M. Led by Dr. Park, its mission is to help people with physical limitations remove those limitations and regain independence they may have lost. It does this through using computers to monitor body signals.

What it does

This is a robot arm that is supposed to model a human arm. The myographic sensor monitors the bicep for electrical activity, and then if there is any, it moves the robot arm just like yours is raised! The other degrees of freedom have they're values hand picked, so we can do get it to do fun things like high fives!

Challenges we ran into

In the last three hours, our muscle sensor's reference node broke clean off. This made it very hard to use towards the end.

What we learned

We learned a lot about working with noisy data. This is huge in any engineering discipline, so we are very happy we had the chance to be exposed to it in a hands on way.