Robot Arms: Not Just for the Jedi Anymore

It’s not a topic to be taken lightly, despite the flip­pant nature of my title. You have got to read this, though. We’ve seen a lot of crit­i­cally wounded ser­vice per­son­nel return to fight the ene­mies that made them amputees in the first place. Some of the sto­ries are remark­able. Grunts that lose and arm, so they study math to go back into the artillery, snipers that lose one eye so they teach them­selves to shoot from the other. It’s hum­bling, though if I had my druthers such incred­i­ble achieve­ments would never be necessary.

Now this guy has designed some­thing that takes pros­thetic replace­ment to a whole new level. It’s cool as hell, gang, and you have to won­der if it’s not the often-​​theorized bridge to what you might as well think an “aug­mented grunt”. Call it the Steve Austin the­ory (the really cool action hero from when I was grow­ing up, not the big sweaty dude that jumps around a wrestling ring with other big sweaty dudes). You know. We can rebuild him. Better. Stronger. Faster.

Just for the record, for those of you who don’t remem­ber the Cold War, astro­naut Steve Austin was way more bad ass and far cooler than the Terminator, Jake 2.0 or any of the other mod­ern ver­sions. Nothing against ‘em, I’m just saying.

Anyway, inven­tor Dean Kamen, the guy that named it after Luke Skywalker (instead of Lee Majors’ char­ac­ter, unfor­tu­nately, but we’ll let that slide) says that while fatal­i­ties are down on the bat­tle­field (bet­ter armor, bet­ter CASEVAC pro­ce­dures, faster move­ment to a higher level of care facil­ity, etc.), a lot of our guys and gals are com­ing back from the AOR miss­ing limbs. The num­ber of amputees has gone down some as qual­ity of armor on the vehi­cles we’re using goes up, but the while there are fewer troops los­ing limbs, the pro­por­tion of dou­ble ampu­ta­tees has gone way up (as the insur­gents use more and more pow­er­ful devices like the EFP to com­pen­sate for the bet­ter armor. In 2006, 25% of all ser­vice­men and –women that became amputees lost two or more limbs; dou­ble the rate of 2003. Amputees com­prise approx­i­mately 2.2% of WIA per­son­nel, but 5% of per­son­nel who are unable to return to duty. These are grim sta­tis­tic sin­deed, maybe one that really doesn’t make your yes and heart hurt until you see them recov­er­ing and get­ting on with their lives. I’m hon­estly not sure how the staff there can go in day after day and not spend their evenings weeping.

So Dean Kamen set out to out to develop a pros­thetic arm that would be sen­si­tive enough to pick up a grape and allow a res­i­dent of Walter Reed’s Ward 57 to pick up a razor, but be “self-​​contained” in terms of power. The orig­i­nal goal for devel­op­ment was a two year dead­line. Apparently about a year later they’d devel­oped a 9lb motor­ized arm using tita­nium and cus­tom built motors, an arm with 18 degrees of move­ment. Not as good as never los­ing your arm to a muj device in the first place, but bet­ter than hav­ing to wipe your ass with a hook the rest of your life.

According to Gizmodo, “… con­trol tech­niques are rev­o­lu­tion­ary. He’s play­ing a video of a guy who didn’t have both his arms for 18 years, and learned how to use the arms effec­tively in less than two dozen hours of train­ing. He’s show­ing a video that shows a guy who knows how to punch, pass a Ping Pong ball to his friend and pour a drink for another man who is hold­ing a cup with the same type of arm. Then the video shows Chuck, the man with no arms, for the first time in 13 years, feed­ing him­self cereal…”

Here’s the most amaz­ing thing about it — they’re devel­op­ing it so the limb can be con­trolled by the amputee’s mind. Perhaps more of a con­scious thing that what you’re used to, but think about the ram­i­fi­ca­tions of that for a minute. It’s like some­thing from the sci-​​fi chan­nel (think Eureka) being used right now to improve the remain­der of the lives of young men and women that have scarcely begun their lives. We’re talk­ing at times about per­son­nel who aren’t yet old enough to walk in and buy them­selves a beer, but they’ve given up limbs in the ser­vice of their country.

Gizmodo also says that, “Attaching the arm directly to nerves required a lot of surgery…but there are lim­ited arm func­tions, even if it’s very com­pli­cated. Learning how to con­trol a back hoe, with four con­trols, takes years. And the arm has 18 degrees of free­dom. But peo­ple don’t learn how by using each degree. In fact, it’s more effi­cient, Dean says. There are three degrees of free­dom, so they did macros. With this, a man learned how to pick up bot­tles, nails and other items.

Attaching the arm was a chal­lenge, day to day. Nine pounds on an arm is heavy over a few min­utes, let alone a day. So they knew that no one would wear them because of that. So Dean designed air blad­ders that shift the weight on the body when pas­sive (like fid­get­ing in a chair) and inflate to be hard when the ser­vos in the arm detect a load…”

Research is con­tin­u­ing for the use of infrared light to read sig­nals going through the skull as a pos­si­ble con­trol mechanism.

I think the thing that impresses me the most about this guy is his atti­tude. He says it the respon­si­bil­ity of intel­lec­tu­ally gifted and or wealthy peo­ple to help make the world a bet­ter place. He obvi­ously walks the damn walk.

If you can stand to read more with­out your heart break­ing (and I’m being seri­ous here, not a wise ass) you might check out Military inStep, http://​www​.amputee​-coali​tion​.org/​m​i​l​i​t​a​r​y​-​i​n​s​t​ep/.

– Breach Bang Clear!

September 18th, 2008 | Door Kickers | 40828 Comments »http://defensetech.org/2008/09/18/robot-arms-not-just-for-the-jedi-anymore/Robot+Arms%3A+Not+Just+for+the+Jedi+Anymore2008-09-18+16%3A00%3A25Ward You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.