Ben Farley: Developing a Virtual Environment for Integration with Exoskeleton Arms

Developing a Virtual Environment for Integration with Exoskeleton Arms

Ben Farley spent the summer working in the Bionics Lab at the University of California, Santa Cruz under the supervision of Jacob Rosen. His work centered around a pair of exoskeleton arms, designed by Dr. Rosen himself, which are to be used in rehabilitation for stroke patients. When a person suffers a stroke, they often lose partial or complete use of their arms. When undergoing rehab, the patient is required to perform a large number of tedious, repetitive exercises in order to build strength and muscle mass and regain use of their arms. This requires several hours of meeting with their therapist each week, and is often difficult to maintain. The goal of this project is to provide patients a more convenient and motivating form of rehab by creating games that they can play using the exoskeleton arms.

Ben’s part of the project involved developing a virtual environment that could be used to develop games for the exoskeleton arms.  He did this from the ground up, using an open source software package called Coin3D. In order to create this virtual environment, Ben had to work with several different fields of computer science:  graphics, for the visual aspects of the environment; networking, for allowing the robotic arms to communicate with the program; hardware, for understanding how the machinery of the arm related to the movement of a virtual representation of that arm; and even some physics, in order to build a simple physics engine for the world. By the end of the summer, Ben had succeeded in creating a basic virtual world. It included a functional physics engine with a bouncing ball, as well as a virtual entity that accurately mirrored movements of the actual exoskeleton arms and could be used to interact with the ball. This program provides a simple framework which future researchers can use to develop games for stroke patients.