Proposal Title: PECASE: Virtual Robotic Environments for Rehabilitation and Human Augmentation Institution: Carnegie-Mellon University
To develop truly integrated human-robot interactive environments to understand, assist, rehabilitate, and enhance the human neuromuscular systems, a virtual robotic environment that explores human's full potential needs and abilities will be developed. As the first step, an inherently safe stationary wearable arm system will be designed and constructed with a neuro-muscular system identification technique to extract the human adaptation parameters in real time. The intellectual merit of the proposed activity is that, using this virtual robotic environment, fundamental scientific questions relating to human perceptual and neural interactions between the virtual and actual movements will be investigated. With these intellectual contributions, this environment will immediately lead to rehabilitating patients with motor impairments, even for those who are not strong enough to execute task-level movements on their own, by steering them beyond what they had previously thought they were capable of doing. The educational goals are to create interdisciplinary educational environment, to increase the number of women in engineering and computer science, and to increase the interaction between motor-impaired students and engineering students. The proposed research and educational approach will have a significant and broader impact not only in the scientific and educational communities but also the lives of disabled people who are not currently able to independently execute everyday tasks.
This project was originally funded as a CAREER award, and was converted to a Presidential Early Career Award for Engineers and Scientists (PECASE) award in September 2004.
