Advanced Prosthetics
Millions of people worldwide are forced to live life with total or partial arm amputations. Despite the utility associated with the arm, protheses generally have a very poor adoption rate within the amputee population. Our research focuses on methods for improving the adoption of prostheses, including designing simple-to-use protheses, improving manipulation capabilities, changing the way people learn how to use protheses, and using new types of feedback between the prothesis and the human.
Tactile-based Bling Grasping: Object Manipulation Controller for Robotic Hands
Robust object manipulation using a robotic hand remains a challenging task, especially when a priori knowledge of the object being manipulated is not available. Tactile-based blind grasping is hereby defined where only typical sensors on-board the robotic hand unit are available. This project focused on design of robust controllers for tactile-based blind grasping to manipulate unknown objects.
Selected relevant publications:
- W. Shaw-Cortez, D. Oetomo, C. Manzie and P. Choong, Tactile-based Blind Grasping: A Discrete-Time Object Manipulation Controller for Robotic Hands, IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, Vol 3, Issue 2, pp 1064-1071, July 2018. PDF
- W. Shaw-Cortez, D. Oetomo, C. Manzie, and P. Choong, Towards Dynamic Object Manipulation with Tactile Sensing for Prosthetic Hands, in Proceedings of the 2016 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS2016), Daejeon, South Korea. PDF
Practical 3D-printed Soft Robotic Prosthetic Hand
Soft robotic hands have shown great potential to be used as prostheses due to their advantages to yield light weight and compact designs as well as its ease of manufacture. However, existing soft prosthetic hands design were often not geared towards addressing some of the practical requirements highlighted in prosthetics research. The gap between the existing designs and the practical requirements significantly hampers the potential to transfer these designs to real-world applications. This work addressed these requirements with the consideration of the trade-off between practicality and performance.
Selected relevant publications:
- A. Mohammadi, J. Lavranos, H. Zhou, R. Mutlu, G. Alici, Y. Tan, P. Choong, D. Oetomo A practical 3D-printed soft robotic prosthetic hand with multi-articulating capabilities, PLoS ONE, Vol. 15, Issue. 5, May 2020. PDF
- A. Mohammadi, J. Lavranos, P. Choong and D. Oetomo, X-Limb: A Soft Prosthetic Hand with User-Friendly Interface , 2018 International Conference on NeuroRehabilitation (ICNR18). pp.82-86 PDF
Personalized On-line Adaptation of Kinematic Synergies for Human-Prosthesis Interfaces
Synergies have been adopted in prosthetic limb applications to reduce complexity of design, but typically involve a single synergy setting for a population and ignore individual
preference or adaptation capacity. However, personalization of the synergy setting is necessary for the effective operation of the prosthetic device. In this project, a systematic personalization of kinematic synergies for human-prosthesis interfaces using on-line measurements from each individual is proposed. The task of reaching using the upper-limb is described by an objective function and the interface is parameterized by a kinematic synergy. Consequently, personalizing the interface for a given individual can be formulated as finding an optimal personalized parameter. A structure to model the observed motor behaviour that allows for the personalized traits of motor preference and motor learning is proposed, and subsequently used in an on-line optimization scheme to identify the synergies for an individual.
Selected relevant publications:
Bone Conduction as Sensory Feedback Interface
Non-invasive sensory feedback is a desirable goal for upper limb prostheses as well as in human robot interaction and other human machine interfaces. Yet many approaches have been studied, none has been broadly deployed in upper limb prostheses. Bone conduction has the potential to excite an effect known as osseoperception and therefore provides a novel sensory interface. Vibrotactile feedback through the bone, also called bone conduction, can address the issues with vibrotactile feedback systems including force dependency and low bandwidth.
Selected relevant publications:
See more of our work on our 
Youtube Channel