PECASE: Virtual Robotic Environments for Rehabilitation and Human Augmentation

提案名称：PECASE：用于康复和人类增强的虚拟机器人环境机构：卡内基梅隆大学为了开发真正集成的人机交互环境来理解、辅助、康复和增强人类神经肌肉系统，将开发一个探索人类全部潜在需求和能力的虚拟机器人环境。首先，利用神经肌肉系统识别技术，设计并构建固有安全的固定式可穿戴手臂系统，实时提取人体适应参数。所提出的活动的智力价值在于，使用这个虚拟机器人环境，将研究与虚拟和实际运动之间的人类感知和神经相互作用有关的基本科学问题。有了这些智力贡献，这种环境将立即引导运动障碍患者康复，甚至对那些不够强壮的人来说，他们也不能自己执行任务级别的运动，通过引导他们超越他们之前认为自己有能力做的事情。教育目标是创造跨学科的教育环境，增加工程和计算机科学领域的女性人数，并增加运动障碍学生与工程学生之间的互动。拟议的研究和教育方法不仅将对科学界和教育界产生重大和广泛的影响，而且还将对目前无法独立执行日常任务的残疾人的生活产生重大影响。该项目最初是作为职业奖资助的，并于2004年9月转换为工程师和科学家的总统早期职业奖（PECASE）奖。

Proposal Title: PECASE: Virtual Robotic Environments for Rehabilitation andHuman AugmentationInstitution: Carnegie-Mellon UniversityTo develop truly integrated human-robot interactive environments to understand, assist, rehabilitate, and enhance the human neuromuscular systems, a virtual robotic environment that explores human's full potential needs and abilities will be developed. As the first step, an inherently safe stationary wearable arm system will be designed and constructed with a neuro-muscular system identification technique to extract the human adaptation parameters in real time. The intellectual merit of the proposed activity is that, using this virtual robotic environment, fundamental scientific questions relating to human perceptual and neural interactions between the virtual and actual movements will be investigated. With these intellectual contributions, this environment will immediately lead to rehabilitating patients with motor impairments, even for those who are not strong enough to execute task-level movements on their own, by steering them beyond what they had previously thought they were capable of doing. The educational goals are to create interdisciplinary educational environment, to increase the number of women in engineering and computer science, and to increase the interaction between motor-impaired students and engineering students. The proposed research and educational approach will have a significant and broader impact not only in the scientific and educational communities but also the lives of disabled people who are not currently able to independently execute everyday tasks.This project was originally funded as a CAREER award, and was converted to a Presidential Early Career Award for Engineers and Scientists (PECASE) award in September 2004.