If you started reading this blog by immediately watching the video below, what’s going on may not appear immediately obvious to you. At first glance, it may appear as though we are wildly swinging our arms attached to and in front of expensive equipment. However, this is actually not the case! What’s happening is our arms are being tracked by cameras, firstly by a webcam on a laptop and finally a kinect. This tracking is used as feedback to a controller which stimulates our biceps electrically causing it to contract, resulting in the arm lifting
We had implemented our first iteration of the controller on February 28th and have from then on, been improving on its performance iteratively. You will see in the last bit of the video that Genevieve’s arm is being controlled with relatively high precision and smoothness.