Robotics Commons^™

Sam-1: An Assistive Robot For Remote Patient Monitoring, Aana Farhana Ahsan

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The global aging population has increased the demand for caregiving, while the availability of caregivers has not grown at the same pace. These trends have contributed to disparities in consistent and accessible care for older adults and increased caregiver burden. Geriatric care robots have emerged as a promising solution to support older adults and reduce caregiver burden. Existing systems have been developed for a wide range of applications, including rehabilitation, social support, assistance with activities of daily living, therapy, and caregiver telepresence. This thesis presents the development of SAM-1, an assistive robot designed to support remote monitoring of older adults …

Using Ai To Predict Energy Expenditure In Lower Limb Prosthesis Users, Nelly Diaz, Siem Hadish

Posters - 2026

• Computer vision has evolved from simple image classification and object detection to analyzing human motion and biomechanics (1). • CNN’s are usually focused on image classification, but, in this case, we are not asking the model if a person is walking. • Many real-world problems require regression: Predicting a continuous number like energy expenditure of walking is a complex task. • It is essential for Prosthetists to understand energy expenditure of their prosthetic patients (2). • An amputee may use 20-30% more energy to walk. • In this project, we developed an AI model to analyze human motion and …

Exploring Interactive Robotic Music Therapy Systems For Rehabilitation: A Survey Paper, Hector A. Salinas Gordillo

Discovery Undergraduate Interdisciplinary Research Internship

Interactive robotic music therapy introduces an innovative opportunity, where human guided musical interaction with robotic systems can create adaptive and engaging therapeutic experiences. This survey explores the current state of research at the intersection of robotics, music, and rehabilitation, focusing on emerging technologies such as human robot interaction methods and system designs that help enable real time, interactive music therapy.

Potential patient groups include individuals undergoing motor or cognitive rehabilitation, such as those recovering from stroke, living with Parkinson’s disease, cerebral palsy, or other motor impairments, as well as individuals with developmental disorders or limited mobility.

Traditional rehabilitation exercises may …

Design Of A Teleoperabletendon-Driven Robotic Hand, Zachary Giese, Joseph Gober, Samuel Grisham, Avery Mahan, Aspen White, Brayden May, Aspen White

ATU Scholars Symposium

This work presents the design, implementation, and validation of a 3D-printed tendon-driven robotic hand with a bi-directional wireless control system. The robotic hand emulates human anatomical principles, focusing on replicating flexion and extension mechanisms of the metacarpophalangeal (MCP), proximal interphalangeal (PIP), and distal interphalangeal (DIP) joints via a tendon-pulley system. Iterative prototyping resolved initial challenges in joint stiffness, tendon routing, and servo interference, culminating in a design where a single servo drives both flexion and extension for each joint using a bidirectional tendon control mechanism. A reliable bidirectional wireless communication framework, using Arduino Nano Every microcontrollers and NRF24L01 modules, enables …

Clinical Use Of Sit2stand Ai Application For Kinematic Analysis In Prosthesis Users., Samerial Brown

Posters - 2025

Biomechanical analysis is a tool to evaluate prosthetic and orthotic patient's. These tools offer the clinician capability of understanding the mechanism of injury, gait deviation or prosthesis problem. Video based analysis require expensive hardware, software, and training which sometimes costs $40-100,000.

The recent advent of artificial intelligence (AI) has opened up the possibility of acquiring high speed human motion video analysis using low-cost hardware and open-source machine learning algorithms. Still, free assessments like the Sit2Stand test is a current clinical outcome measure which assesses ability of a patient to stand and sit as fast as possible 5x. The faster the …

Advancing Prosthetic Technology: 3d-Printed Robotic Arm With Micro Linear Actuators, Vu Tran, Nathan Reed, Mahdi Yazdanpour

Posters-at-the-Capitol

The increasing demand for affordable and accessible prosthetic solutions has driven innovation in the field of robotics. In this project, we present the design and development of a 3D-printed robotic prosthetic arm aimed at addressing the challenges faced by individuals with upper limb amputations. Our prosthetic arm utilizes five micro linear actuators to achieve precise and naturalistic movement. The design of the prosthetic arm prioritizes affordability and accessibility, with a focus on leveraging 3D printing technology to reduce manufacturing costs and enable customization. The use of micro linear actuators offers advantages in terms of compactness, lightweight construction, and efficient power …

Integrated Compliant Structure For A Hand Exoskeleton, Tristan R. Koopman

Honors Undergraduate Theses

This thesis presents the design and prototyping of a wearable hand exoskeleton that integrates a flexible structural framework to assist with hand movement while maintaining comfort and anatomical conformity. The goal was to create a device that supports tendon-driven actuation through a compliant structure, combining elements of rigidity and flexibility to match the natural geometry and motion of the human hand. Traditional hand exoskeletons often trade off motion for structure or vice versa. This project aims to bridge that gap with a hybrid compliant design that balances flexibility and support. The design process followed an iterative approach involving rapid prototyping …

Mechanically Cost-Effective Approach For Bipedal Walking In Robots Using Instantaneous Collision Angle, Smit R. Patel

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Humans, as bipedal locomotors, are effective at reducing the mechanical cost of transport (CoTmech) by adopting movement strategies and gaits that minimize energy expenditure for a given distance. By using different gaits at different speeds, leveraging their long spring-like tendons and muscle elasticity which store and release energy during movement, humans reduce the mechanical effort required for locomotion. Current locomotion solutions offered in bipedal robots, based on legacy walking and running gait models, are not great at energy efficiency unless walking at very low speeds. Additionally, the control system of robots, designed to ensure stability and adaptability, requires substantial resources, …

Technocene, Vir Joseph Naidu

Masters Theses

Embodied human communication within the Anthropocene. Existing at the intersection of technology, and the body.

The design industry has developed technology that is, paradoxically, isolating. The exposure to a vast audience in the digital sphere has introduced new societal pressures, leading to a disconnection from our immediate surroundings, detached, and donning metaphorical masks. Technocene lives on the fringes of the discipline by blending conceptual thinking with practical application. Through curious, experimental artifacts, it prompts us to shed our masks and embrace vulnerability. Technocene endeavors to reimagine the human experience by acting as a discursive design project. It probes the boundaries …

Hand Movement Analysis For Surgical Suturing Skill Assessment, Amir Mehdi Shayan

All Theses

To enhance patient safety, surgical education is increasingly incorporating simulation for formative skills assessment and training. However, many standardized assessment tools rely on human raters for performance assessment, which is resource-intensive and subjective. Simulators that provide automated and objective metrics from sensor data can address this limitation. This thesis presents an instrumented bench suturing simulator, patterned after the Clock Face (CF) radial suturing model from the Fundamentals of Vascular Surgery (FVS), for automated and objective assessment of open suturing skills by particularly focusing on biomechanical analysis of hand movements. For this research, 97 participants (35 attending surgeons and fellows, 32 …

Mobile Robot Adhesion Methodology And Development Of An Automatous Robot Module, Lauren Baird, Zachariah Stone, Madison Lemons, Jonathon Moody

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Due to the increasing availability of space travel as not only a scientific exploration but a commercial exploration, there is a need for an onsite repair station that can be deployed in the event of aircraft maintenance, damage, or failure. We have been tasked with researching and creating a prototype of an automatous robot that can be attached to a spacecraft body, move along the surface while avoiding obstacles, scan for damage, 3D print a repair piece, and then make the repair, all without the need of direct human input. Our team, as will be discussed throughout, was tasked with …

List Of 121 Papers Citing One Or More Skin Lesion Image Datasets, Neda Alipour

Other resources

No abstract provided.

Live Audiovisual Remote Assistance System (Laras) For Person With Visual Impairments, Zachary Frey, Nghia Vo, Varaha Maithreya, Tais Mota, Urvish Trivedi, Redwan Alqasemi, Rajiv Dubey

Florida Conference on Recent Advances in Robotics

According to "The World Report on Vision" by World Health Organization (WHO) [1], there are more than 2.2 billion people who have near or distant vision Impairments, out of which 36 million people are classified as entirely blind. This report also emphasizes the importance of social and communal support in enabling individuals with vision impairments to integrate into society and reach their full potential. While performing daily activities and navigating the environment, people with visual impairments (PVIs) often require direct or synchronous assistance [2]. Consequently, there is a growing need for automated solutions to assist in this regard. However, existing …

Gesture-Based American Sign Language (Asl) Translation System, Kayleigh Moore, Stefano Pecile, Mahdi Yazdanpour

Posters-at-the-Capitol

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), over 5% of the world's population experiences severe hearing loss. Approximately 9 million people in the U.S. are either functionally deaf or have mild-to-severe hearing loss. In this research, we designed and implemented a translation interface which turns American Sign Language (ASL) gestures captured from a pair of soft robotic gloves into text and speech instantaneously.

We used a combination of flex sensors, tactile sensors, and accelerometers to recognize hand gestures and to record hand and fingers positions, movements, and orientations. The digitized captured gestures were then sent to our proposed translation interface …

Design And Fabrication Of A Force-Displacement Control Mechanism For Bone-Surgical Tool Testing, Kenneth Nwagu

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

This project focuses on the design and fabrication of an experimental setup for orthopedic-tool testing, tailored for a surgical instrumentation company. The multifaceted project encompasses a literature review, conceptual design, prototyping, and rigorous testing, resulting in a versatile control system capable of assessing various orthopedic tools, including bone drills, saws, burrs, and power handpieces.

Orthopedic surgical procedures (which include cutting and/or drilling into bone) often need to be performed on bones for faster recovery. The drilling and cutting process can cause an increase in temperature at the cutting site which can cause bone necrosis. The tools also need to be …

Material Characterization And Comparison Of Sol-Gel Deposited And Rf Magnetron Deposited Lead Zirconate Titanate Thin Films, Katherine Lynne Miles

Mechanical Engineering ETDs

Lead zirconate titanate (PZT) has been a material of interest for sensor, actuator, and transducer applications in microelectromechanical systems (MEMS). This is due to their favorable piezoelectric, pyroelectric and ferroelectric properties. While various methods are available to deposit PZT thin films, radio frequency (RF) magnetron sputtering was selected to provide high quality PZT films with the added capability of batch processing. These sputter deposited PZT films were characterized to determine their internal film stress, Young’s modulus, composition, and structure. After characterization, the sputtered PZT samples were poled using corona poling and direct poling methods. As a means of comparison, commercially …

Development And Evaluation Of A Hand Exoskeleton For Neurorehabilitation Post Stroke, Ashley Joyce Mont

Dissertations

Stroke affects approximately 800,000 people in the United States each year, and due to its chronic effects, it is one of the leading causes of disability. Many individuals with stroke suffer the loss of motor function in their paretic upper extremity, and longitudinal studies show that 30 — 66% of individuals with hemiplegia fail to regain arm function six months post stroke. After a stroke, the brain undergoes neuroplasticity which will promote recovery of function. Investigators and clinicians are trying to develop rehabilitation interventions that can be designed to promote neuroplasticity, enhancing the recovery outcomes of therapy.

For individuals with …

Multi-Modality Breast Mri Segmentation Using Nn-Unet For Preoperative Planning Of Robotic Surgery Navigation, Motaz Alqaoud, John Plemmons Md, Eric Feliberti Md, Facs, Krishnanand Kaipa, Siqin Dong, Gabor Fichtinger, Yimming Xiao, Michel Audette

Modeling, Simulation and Visualization Student Capstone Conference

Segmentation of the chest region and breast tissues is essential for surgery planning and navigation. This paper proposes the foundation for preoperative segmentation based on two cascaded architectures of deep neural networks (DNN) based on the state-of-the-art nnU-Net. Additionally, this study introduces a polyvinyl alcohol cryogel (PVA-C) breast phantom based on the segmentation of the DNN automated approach, enabling the experiments of navigation system for robotic breast surgery. Multi-modality breast MRI datasets of T2W and STIR images were acquired from 10 patients. Segmentation evaluation utilized the Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC), segmentation accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity. First, a single class labeling …

Design Of Plastic Contaminant Eliminator In Seed Cotton, Joshua H. Tandio

Theses and Dissertations

Plastic contamination in cotton is a problem in cotton industry and researchers have worked on this problem with different approaches. This thesis documents the design of mechanical and electronic real-time systems for detecting and removing plastic contaminants. The mechanical system was designed to expose plastic embedded inside the seed cotton to the sensor and to separate plastic contaminated cotton from the process stream. The detection system consisted of an embedded computer interfaced with a USB camera and Neural Network (NN) software running in it. Two NN models were tested, a transfer learning model and a built-from-scratch original model. The original …

A Review Paper: Analysis Of Weka Data Mining Techniques For Heart Disease Prediction System, Basma Jumaa Saleh, Ahmed Yousif Falih Saedi, Ali Talib Qasim Al-Aqbi, Lamees Abdalhasan Salman

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

Data mining is characterized as searching for useful information through very large data sets. Some of the key and most common techniques for data mining are association rules, classification, clustering, prediction, and sequential models. For a wide range of applications, data mining techniques are used. Data mining plays a significant role in disease detection in the health care industry. The patient should be needed to detect a number of tests for the disease. However, the number of tests should be reduced by using data mining techniques. In time and performance, this reduced test plays an important role. Heart disease is …

Reading Robot, Gillian Watts, Andrew Myers, Sabrinna Tan, Taylor Klein, Omeed Djassemi

General Engineering

Presently, there is an insufficient availability of human experts to assist students in reading competency and comprehension. Our team’s goal was to create an improved socially assistive robot for use by therapists, teachers, and parents to help children and adults develop reading skills while they do not have access to specialists. HAPI is a socially assistive robot that we created with the goal of helping students practice their reading comprehension skills. HAPI enables a student to improve their reading skills without an educator present, while enabling educators to review the student's performance remotely. Design constraints included: physical size, weight, duration …

Design And Development Of A Robotic Platform For General Neurosurgical Procedures, Mehbodniya Amir Hossein

Student Works (2020-2029)

For the first time in 1985, robots were introduced to the neurosurgical operating rooms. Since then this field of robotics have advanced with new technologies with better accuracy and safety. However, developing robots for neurosurgery is a challenging task due to the sensitive nature of these applications and additionally their high cost of development. A typical neurosurgical robot costs millions of dollars in 2018, even though the costs of components and calculations have been lowered tremendously. This is mainly due to focus of current neurosurgical robots on few highly precise and specific surgical tasks which makes their use limited. In …

How Degrees Of Freedom Affects Sense Of Agency, Akima Connelly, Jungsu Pak, Tian Lan, Uri Maoz

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

Can the rubber-hand illusion be extended to a moving robotic arm in different degrees of freedom (DOF), inducing sense of ownership & agency over the arm? We hypothesize that DOF closer to what humans possess will result in a stronger sense of ownership and agency.

Improving 3d Printed Prosthetics With Sensors And Motors, Rachel Zarin

Honors Projects

A 3D printed hand and arm prosthetic was created from the idea of adding bionic elements while keeping the cost low. It was designed based on existing models, desired functions, and materials available. A tilt sensor keeps the hand level, two motors move the wrist in two different directions, a limit switch signals the fingers to open and close, and another motor helps open and close the fingers. All sensors and motors were built on a circuit board, programmed using an Arduino, and powered by a battery. Other supporting materials include metal brackets, screws, guitar strings, elastic bands, small clamps, …

Quantified Measurement Of The Tilt Effect In A Family Of Café Wall Illusions, Nasim Nematzadeh Dr., David Martin Powers Prof.

MODVIS Workshop

This abstract explores the tilt effect in a family of Café Wall illusions using a Classical Gaussian Receptive Field model (CRF). Our model constructs an intermediate representation called edge map at multiple scales (Fig. 1) that reveals tilt cues and clues involved in the illusory perception of the Café Wall pattern. We investigate a wide range of parameters of the stimulus including mortar width, luminance, tiles contrast, and phase of the tile displacement (the stimuli in Fig. 2). We show that this simple bioplausible model, simulating the contrast sensitivity of the retinal ganglion cells, can not only detect the tilts …

Estimation Of Multi-Directional Ankle Impedance As A Function Of Lower Extremity Muscle Activation, Lauren Knop

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

The purpose of this research is to investigate the relationship between the mechanical impedance of the human ankle and the corresponding lower extremity muscle activity. Three experimental studies were performed to measure the ankle impedance about multiple degrees of freedom (DOF), while the ankle was subjected to different loading conditions and different levels of muscle activity. The first study determined the non-loaded ankle impedance in the sagittal, frontal, and transverse anatomical planes while the ankle was suspended above the ground. The subjects actively co-contracted their agonist and antagonistic muscles to various levels, measured using electromyography (EMG). An Artificial Neural Network …

Estimation And Prediction Of The Human Gait Dynamics For The Control Of An Ankle-Foot Prosthesis, Guilherme Aramizo Ribeiro

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

With the growing population of amputees, powered prostheses can be a solution to improve the quality of life for many people. Powered ankle-foot prostheses can be made to behave similar to the lost limb via controllers that emulate the mechanical impedance of the human ankle. Therefore, the understanding of human ankle dynamics is of major significance. First, this work reports the modulation of the mechanical impedance via two mechanisms: the co-contraction of the calf muscles and a change of mean ankle torque and angle. Then, the mechanical impedance of the ankle was determined, for the first time, as a multivariable …

Dynamic Model For Simulating Motion Of The Right Ventricle, Brian Michael Larsen, Sam Koopman Porter, John Francis D'Ambrosio

Mechanical Engineering

This report documents all the research, ideation, and mockups used to determine right ventricle motion and develop a system capable of reproducing that motion on a tissue sample. The model is intended for evaluating anchoring systems being developed by Edwards Lifesciences for use with tricuspid valve therapies. Several design solutions were considered for the primary functions of recreating motion of the right ventricle and attaching tissue to the device. From these ideas a primary means of producing motion and attaching tissue was selected. These ideas were then developed over the course of a school year to become the final system …

Psychophysiological Analysis Of A Pedagogical Agent And Robotic Peer For Individuals With Autism Spectrum Disorders., Mohammad Nasser Saadatzi

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by ongoing problems in social interaction and communication, and engagement in repetitive behaviors. According to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an estimated 1 in 68 children in the United States has ASD. Mounting evidence shows that many of these individuals display an interest in social interaction with computers and robots and, in general, feel comfortable spending time in such environments. It is known that the subtlety and unpredictability of people’s social behavior are intimidating and confusing for many individuals with ASD. Computerized learning environments and robots, however, prepare a predictable, …

Design Of A Flexible Control Platform And Miniature In Vivo Robots For Laparo-Endoscopic Single-Site Surgeries, Lou P. Cubrich

Department of Mechanical and Materials Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Minimally-invasive laparoscopic procedures have proven efficacy for a wide range of surgical procedures as well as benefits such as reducing scarring, infection, recovery time, and post-operative pain. While the procedures have many advantages, there are significant shortcomings such as limited instrument motion and reduced dexterity. In recent years, robotic surgical technology has overcome some of these limitations and has become an effective tool for many types of surgeries. These robotic platforms typically have an increased workspace, greater dexterity, improved ergonomics, and finer control than traditional laparoscopic methods. This thesis presents the designs of both a four degree-of-freedom (DOF) and 5-DOF …