Introduction and Testing of an Alternative Control Approach for a Robotic Prosthetic Arm

Abstract

Commercially available robotic prosthetic arms currently use independent joint control. An alternative controller involving only control of the hand in a Cartesian frame rather than controlling each joint independently is proposed and tested. An experimental 4DOF robotic arm was used as the platform for testing the proposed control approach. As opposed to joint control, Cartesian control requires the solution to the inverse kinematics problem. The inverse kinematics solution was developed for the robotic arm using the extended Jacobian method. The two control methodologies, joint control and Cartesian control, were tested on five able-bodied human subjects. Improvement of one control methodology over the other was measured by the time it took for the subjects to complete a simple motor task. The timed trial results indicated that Cartesian control was both more intuitive and more effective than joint control. So, the results suggest that much improvement can be achieved by using the proposed Cartesian control methodology.

Evaluating a Semiautonomous Brain-Computer Interface Based on Conformal Geometric Algebra and Artificial Vision

“…Figure 1 shows the modeled robot as well as its joints and links. The DOF of this robot corresponds to its shoulder rotation, elbow flexion-extension, wrist flexion-extension, wrist rotation, and hand open-close function [33]. The inverse kinematics solution was obtained for joints J 0 , J 2 , and J 3 .…”

Introduction and Testing of an Alternative Control Approach for a Robotic Prosthetic Arm

“…A custombuilt board converts RS232 serial commands issued by the target computer to TTL commands, which is accepted by the controller of the AX-12 servomotors on the robotic arm. The details of the design of the conversion board is found in [11].…”