RESEARCH ARTICLE


Introduction and Testing of an Alternative Control Approach for a Robotic Prosthetic Arm



Lauren Griggs , Farbod Fahimi*
Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering University of Alabama in Huntsville, Huntsville, 35899 Alabama, USA


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Creative Commons License
© Griggs and Fahimi; Licensee Bentham Open.

open-access license: This is an open access article licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/) which permits unrestricted, non-commercial use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the work is properly cited.

* Address correspondence to this author at the Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering University of Alabama in Huntsville, Huntsville, 35899 Alabama, USA; Tel: (256) 824 5671; Fax: (256) 824 6758; E-mail: farbod.fahimi@uah.edu


Abstract

Commercially available robotic prosthetic arms currently use independent joint control. An alternative controller involving only control of the hand in a Cartesian frame rather than controlling each joint independently is proposed and tested. An experimental 4DOF robotic arm was used as the platform for testing the proposed control approach. As opposed to joint control, Cartesian control requires the solution to the inverse kinematics problem. The inverse kinematics solution was developed for the robotic arm using the extended Jacobian method. The two control methodologies, joint control and Cartesian control, were tested on five able-bodied human subjects. Improvement of one control methodology over the other was measured by the time it took for the subjects to complete a simple motor task. The timed trial results indicated that Cartesian control was both more intuitive and more effective than joint control. So, the results suggest that much improvement can be achieved by using the proposed Cartesian control methodology.

Keywords: Cartesian control, experiments, extended Jacobian method, independent joint control, inverse kinematics, robotic prosthetic arms..