Robotic Motor Skills Assessment System

• The REACH lab is collaborating with the Department of Kinesiology to create a novel strategy to diagnose and treat autism in children. Currently we are running a human participant study to determine how our novel diagnostic methods compare with existing methodologies.

Faculty:	Michael Zinn – Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Wisconsin-Madison Andrea Mason – Department of Kinesiology, University of Wisconsin-Madison Brittany Travers – Department of Kinesiology, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Students:	Guru Subramani  – Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Wisconsin-Madison Aubrey Fisher  – Department of Kinesiology, University of Wisconsin-Madison Moria Bittmann – Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Funding:	University of Wisconsin Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Graduate Education Interdisciplinary Research Award, 2016

Towards this goal we have built the RoboticMotor Skills Assessment System.

The system is designed to simulate drawing tasks but also allow physical perturbations while drawing. The cursor on the screen moves in coordination with the robot like a computer mouse. The participant uses the robot to draw shapes on the screen. The robot is capable of applying perturbations on the participant making it either harder or easier for the person to do these drawing tasks. The robot is constrained in a x-y plane.

The system consists of a Kinova mico2 robot arm. The end effector was replaced with a custom made instrumented handle. The handle has force torque sensors that allow measuring interactions with the robot. The following figure shows the modified end effector. The system is capable of measuring human interaction forces and torques and capture human arm motion from Vizualeyez motion trackers. The software heavily leverages ROS and Labview for middleware.