Design and control of dexterous hand prostheses
Speaker: Christian Cipriani, The BioRobotics Institute, Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna
Date: Monday, March 4 2013
Time: 4:00PM to 5:00PM
Location: 3-270
Host: John Leonard, MIT CSAIL
Contact: John Leonard, jleonard@mit.edu
The hand is a powerful tool and its loss, due to amputation, causes a
severe psychological and physical drawback. Despite the significant
impact of losing a hand, the numbers of amputees requiring prosthesis
are too small to push manufacturers to innovate their products; thus
control interfaces and hand designs have almost not changed in the
past 40 years.
The talk will provide an overview of the requirements and design
criteria suggested to design multi-digit prosthetic hands and
physiologically appropriate control systems to be used by transradial
amputees. First I will review the state of the art and open
challenges, then I will focus on the most recent research in the field
carried out within the BioRobotics Institute of Scuola Sant'Anna, Pisa
Italy. This will include examples of hand designs, control interfaces
based on intramuscular electrodes and vibrotactile systems able to
provide sensory feedback based on a "discrete-event" approach and to
induce in the person the feeling of ownership of the prosthesis.
Bio: Christian Cipriani has been an Assistant Professor of Biomedical
Robotics at the BioRobotics Institute of the Scuola Superiore
Sant'Anna, Pisa Italy since January 2011. He received the MSc in
Electronic Engineering from the University of Pisa, in 2004 and the
Ph.D. in Biorobotics from IMT Institute for Advanced Studies, Lucca
Italy in 2008 (Advisor: Dr. Carrozza). In 2009 he founded Prensilia, a
spin-off company that develops and commercializes robotic hands. In
2012 he has been a Visiting Scientist with the Biomechatronics
Development Lab directed by Dr. R. Weir at University of Colorado
Denver, with a Fulbright Scholarship. He is currently the PI of an
early career grant funded by the Italian Ministry of Research and of a
European project on upper limb prosthetics. His research interests
cover mechatronic, controllability and sensory feedback issues of
dexterous robotic hands to be used as thought-controlled prostheses.
http://www-arts.sssup.it/tiki/tiki-index.php?page=Christian+Cipriani
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