For my bachelor’s assignment I wanted to do something similar to the Biorobotics minor. During this module a robot is designed to help people with some motor control deficit to practice or replace movement.
The great thing about this module however is that the robots are actually built, instead of remaining a half-assed theoretical design! Which is something that in my experience rarely happens at the UT. I enjoyed every aspect of this module: designing, Solidworking, signal filtering/coding, robot control coding, practical workshop stuff and integrating all of these into a working robot.
I chose to go with a guitar-strumming robot, designed as a way to help people keep engaging muscles in a fun way or replace a missing arm. Although I’m sure some people with poor sense of rhythm might benefit from replacing their horrible, horrible guitar timings (I might be talking about myself here).
The idea of the guitarrobot is simple: activating a muscle slightly should strum the guitar, and engaging some other muscle should control the loudness of the strum.
The robot’s shoddy construction was made mostly in the Biomechanical Engineering workshop as well as some finishing up in the DesignLab. Therefore I would like to thank the DesignLab staff for having me over and for any advice given.
