Finger/Chin Joystick Control for Robotic Arms and Power Wheelchair Systems

Research Objectives To provide a reliable and easy to Joystick controlled transportation/manipulation system for individuals with restricted mobility for their daily tasks. Design Experimental study. Setting In UWM BioRobotics Lab. Participants Healthy and young participants. Interventions Collaborative Robotic Arm for Activities of Daily Living assistance (picking objects from a desk, the floor, opening doors, drawers and eating), finger/Chin Joystick Control. Main Outcome Measures * Control robotics arm with finger and chin while keeping control of the wheelchair's mobility. * A lightweight software capable of controlling a robotic arm with generic/commercial joysticks. * Intuitive and easy to learn operability of the robotic arm with its multiple control modes. Results The system is composed by a power wheelchair (in this case a Permobil M3 Corpus), a robotic arm (a 6 Degree of Freedom arm with its control box) and the two user joysticks (finger and chin). Some circuitry was developed in order to communicate with the wheelchair electrical system. The experiments were performed by healthy personal in order to measure the operability and ease to use of this controller. The experiment's mean time as well as its difficulty seen by the participants were some of the variables to compare. A 3D trajectory of the robot arm end effector was recorded for the 4 different Activities in the Daily Living using the two different control devices. Each experiment had a fixed position for the wheelchair and the same initial position for the robotic arm. Conclusions The finger/chin joystick control is meant for individuals with restricted mobility, to allow them to perform their activities of daily living that were previously impossible to. This method will allow the to integrate a robotic arm in their power wheelchair system and expand its capabilities. Author(s) Disclosures No conflict.