Assistive Rehabilitation Using a 7-DoF Robotic Arm with Self-Collision and Obstacle Avoidance System

With the help of Robot Operating System (ROS) running on ubuntu 16 environment we have managed to control a seven-degrees-of-freedom (7-DOF) robotic arm developed with dynamixel servos on a Pioneer P3-DX robotic platform. The developed software is able to control any dynamixel-based arm out of the box and can be adapted to other actuators as well in a few easy steps. Thanks to the abstraction power of ROS-based systems, the arm can be easily adapted to do new tasks. The main features of the developed software are: direct kinematics, inverse kinematics, and collision and obstacle avoidance planner. Is this versatility in controlling the arm that makes it for a good candidate regarding prosthetic or exoskeleton arm. These applications can serve to help people in regaining their mobility and in rehabilitation process. For example, a myoelectric control can be achieved easily by using direct kinematics after the message of the muscles was decrypted, a brain-to-machine interface can be used together with the planner responsible with inverse kinematics and collision/obstacle avoidance to control the end-point of the effector while keeping the user and the arm safe.