MRes year on the CDT in Connected Electronic and Photonic Systems

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This project explores the feasibility of building close-to-natural prosthetic hands for amputees in a soft-robotics approach. The proposed research will investigate approaches of making artificial muscles using a novel visible light-responsive thermoplastic elastomer, so that robotic hands constructed with this material can have muscle-like flexible and viscoelastic properties, where fast, precise spatial and temporal control can be achieved with miniaturised light source such as LEDs. Furthermore, the prosthetic hand will be connected with a wearable, impedance-based human-brain interface, where user's intention of movement can be decoded from measuring the impedance of the upper limb muscle groups in real time, from which patterns of impedance change associated to specific hand movement can be extracted and classified to control the prosthetic hand.