Hello Everyone
Its great to have an opportunity with an international community of Element14.com
Here in this blog, I will present my design journey in the development of an advanced and affordable “an artificial leg support”, which will be built using the “sponsored kit” from Element14 & Arduino.
Once it is complete, I aim it as DIY with all steps, and code available.
This prototype is aimed to be used by individuals who need leg support, thus, this artificial leg support which has stair climbing and descending ability can be extended to
- Smart Prosthetics leg
- Or integrated with non- electric or normal wheelchair
Due to financial & time limitations, only 1 leg with full functionality is planned to be submitted, which has to be duplicated and only external fixing in case of wheelchair or if to act as prosthetic, need additional changes and costing. Rest it is just DIY conversion kit and a module which can be used as per need.
The prototype will use following hardware
- Arduino MKR1000 Dev Board which has powerful processor - SAMD21 Cortex-M0 + 32bit ARM
- Arduino MKR1000 IoT Bundle’s Wi-Fi Shield
- Arduino MKR1000 IoT Bundle’s components
- Arduino MKR SD Proto Shield
Arduino UNO Shield Interface Adapter Board given with Challenger’s kit won’t be used.
Artificial leg support is attempted to be imitated as real leg which will be able to do movements: -
(a) lifts up and down wheelchair along with weight
(b) move forward and backward wheelchair along with weight
(c) folding of knee joint, and moving it back and forth
All these movements are electronically controlled.
The movements- up down, back and forth, wheel chair acceleration, stair detection, obstacles detection, are sensed through different sensors given in the “sponsored kit” eg. tilt, proximity, accelerometer, and the feedback responses are calculated using adaptive sliding mode observer (SMO) which assures that the calculated signal movements are very precise and accurate with zero error.
It also uses “Arduino MKR1000 IoT Bundle’s Wi-Fi Shield” to send messages of the movement of wheelchair or while climbing, obstacles found, errors or alarm to the relative or caretaker who is at a remote position and even saves this data on SD card using Arduino MKR SD Proto Shield.
I had submitted little more along with block diagram but I am thinking of doing minor changes in that, so not revealing in this post.
I have received "Challenger's kit" and work will be started.
Thanks.
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