Olin College freshman year 2004 project: EMG-controlled robot hand ("The Thing")

Lilly Cho, Hans Borchardt, and Mel Chua (me), members of Olin's class of 2007, made this for an electronics project for the "It's Alive!" cohort our freshman year in spring 2004. Named after the disembodied hand character on the Addams Family, the device uses an electromyogram (electrodes sensing a voltage difference caused by muscle activity) to control a Lego robot claw.

Electrodes run through some buffering, filtering, and amplifying circuitry we built into a DAQ (data acquisition card) hooked up to a laptop; the laptop runs some C code we wrote to further filter the output, then sends commands to the hand out through the DAQ again. "Thing" was a popular exhibit at the Spring 2004 expo, with kids lining up for a chance to control the claw. individuals on the more... er... "ripped" end of the spectrum (in other words, Hans) had distinguishable enough forearm muscles that they could control the robot hand with a single finger (not shown in this video).

Each of us filmed another teammate explaining the project so we could send little videos of our work home to our parents. Here's mine.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• olin
• robot
• emg