MRes year on the CDT in Connected Electronic and Photonic Systems

这个项目探讨了在软机器人方法中为截肢者构建接近自然假手的可行性。拟议的研究将研究使用新型可见光响应热塑性弹性体制造人造肌肉的方法，以便用这种材料构造的机器人手可以具有肌肉般的灵活性和粘弹性，其中可以使用LED等闪烁光源实现快速，精确的空间和时间控制。此外，假手将与可穿戴的、基于阻抗的人脑接口连接，其中用户的运动意图可以从真实的时间中测量上肢肌肉群的阻抗来解码，从中可以提取和分类与特定手部运动相关联的阻抗变化的模式以控制假手。

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.