From Mind to Matter
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About this event
The human hand is one of nature’s most complex and versatile structures, enabling the unmatched ability to manipulate and sense the surrounding world. The capability to interact with the world with precision and strength have empowered people to create anything from art to technology, making the loss of hands through injury, disease, and congenital conditions a significant for a challenge in a society that is built around them. While recent advances in prosthetic hardware design have emphasised accessibility, open-source solutions, and ease of adoption, current devices remain far less capable than the human hand. With the ultimate goal of designing functional integrated neuro-prosthetics, the next vital stepping stone needed is a focus on adaptivity, where the hard- and software are designed to be able to handle and learn from any scenario that a person finds themselves in. In this dissertation, I address the needed step towards adaptive prosthetics using both passive and active adaptive approaches. For passive adaptivity, an anthropomorphic hand is designed using soft robotics due to their inherent flexibility and shape conformity. However, where soft actuators have unparalleled shape conformity due to this flexibility, this comes at a sacrifice to their strength. To ensure that these soft actuators can be used to achieve a stable grasp on objects of varying weights, several manufacturing techniques were developed to integrate the actuators with rigid components to constrain degrees of freedom, improving force transmission. For active adaptivity, the prosthetic hand is outfitted with an organic neuromorphic circuit and temperature sensors. This neuromorphic circuit, inspired by the function of the human temperature reflex, uses organic transistors to respond to temperature stimuli, and adjusting its sensitivity automatically based on its experiences after integrating it into a traditional feedback control loop on the prosthetic hand. This proof-of-principle hand shows the strengths of a multidisciplinary approach to adaptive gripping, resulting in a system that aligns closer with the capabilities of the human hand than before.
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