3-DOF Admittance Control Robotic Arm with a 3D Virtual Game for facilitated training of the hemiparetic hand

The “3-DOF Admittance Control Robotic Arm with a 3D Virtual Game” is a senior capstone design project for the New Jersey Institute of Technology. This robotic arm is designed for facilitated training of the hemiparetic hand i.e. for patients in need for rehabilitation of their upper extremities. The virtual 3D game is an interactive environment that will track the movements of the robotic arm. In this paper, the software architecture and robot platform is presented. A basic overview of system flow is as follows: a user positions their finger into the end effector of the robotic arm and presses on a strain gauge to input a force; this force is feed into the admittance control paradigm to produce a coordinate position; this position is relayed to the game to move the game cursor accordingly and into an inverse kinematics algorithm that calculates the angles for this position; finally these angles are feed into motors that make up the 3-degrees of freedom for the robotic arm to move the links to this position.