Title: Data-driven Mechanical Design of Dextrous Upper-limb Prosthesis

Date: Tuesday, March 23rd

Time: 3-6PM (EST)

Location (remote only): BlueJeans meeting (https://bluejeans.com/162544128)

Joshua Lee

Robotics PhD Student

Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering

Georgia Institute of Technology

Committee:

Dr. Frank Hammond III (Advisor) - Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology

Dr. Jaydev Desai - Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology

Dr. Jun Ueda - Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology

Dr. Lewis Wheaton - School of Biological Sciences, Georgia Institute of Technology

Dr. Marco Santello - School of Biological and Health Systems Engineering, Arizona State University

Abstract:

The proposed work is to integrate neuromotor control of the human hand with prosthetic control by 1) collecting grasp data from human subjects as a basis for non-anthropomorphic prosthesis. Using the grasp data, steps will be taken to 2) develop a data-driven design of an upper limb prosthesis that shares the kinematics required for healthy human grasps without taking the anthropomorphic design. This work will demonstrate an approach to decrease the gap between the functionality of the human hand and robotic upper-limb prosthesis by 1) introducing a method to optimize the design of upper limb prosthesis by collecting grasping samples from human subjects with a motion capturing glove and 2) minimizing control complexity by reducing the dimensionality of the device while fulfilling the kinematic and kinetic requirements of daily grasping tasks. Using these techniques, a reduced dimensionality upper limb prosthetic will be synthesized and evaluated on human subjects.