One of my first posts ever for BotJunkie was about BeBionic prosthetic hands. After months of research, development, and planning, RSLSteeper, the company responsible for the BeBionic hands has finally launched the incredible product at the World Congress and Trade Fair in Leipzig, Germany May 12-15.

The hands are prosthetic and myo-electric, meaning that they can be controlled by the mind of their user, a technology which is still developing. The BeBionic hands were out for display and testing at the fair, and the general public reaction was an astoundingly positive one- many first-time users found BeBionic’s hands to be extremely easy to use, and amazingly realistic.

The picture above is one of the aforementioned hands, which use a silicone mixture as well as micro-pigmentation for extra realism. As you can see, these hands have gotten so realistic that they may even be considered in the realm of the uncanny valley.

We’re very excited to see these things launch for real- but are they too realistic?

[ BeBionic ] VIA [ Engadget ]

DEKA’s prosthetic robot arm is commonly referred to as the “Luke” arm, but this new robotic hand may be more appropriate for that title, at least as far as the movie goes. Not only is this artificial hand, called the SmartHand, controlled directly by the brain (as opposed to actuated by muscle movements), but it provides some degree of feedback to the nerves of the user, including pressure and even texture (!). So this guy can actually feel things through the robot hand. It’s a neural interface. Like in Star Trek. Welcome to the future, people.

[ Press Release (Translated) ]
[ BBC ] VIA [ Communist Robot ]

CBS has an interesting (and comprehensive) video and accompanying article on DEKA’s robotic prosthetic arm, commonly known as the “Luke” arm. We’ve written about it several times, and while this video doesn’t get into the coolest stuff (the brain control), it’s still worth a watch… If for no other reason than it’s great to see that innovative and effective cybernetics are finally getting to the people who need them the most.

[ CBS News ]

Thanks Andrew!

Dean Kamen’s brain controlled cyborg arm, which we first saw over a year ago, has received an additional three years of research funding. This time, it’s not from DARPA, but from the VA’s Prosthetics and Sensory Aids Service. This is a big step; even without knowing all the details, when funding shifts from the crazy world of DARPA to the Veteran’s Administration, actual availability seems and lot closer. And this appears to be the case: “veterans fitted with the arm will provide feedback to guide engineers in refining the prototype, before it is commercialized and also made available through the VA health care system.” So, it’s very possible that in just a few years, and 18 DoF thought controlled cyborg arm will be available to people who need one.

[ Press Release ] VIA [ Robots.net ]

[ Direct Link to Video ]

19 year old Evan Reynolds lost his hand and lower arm in a car accident. Rather than a conventional prosthetic, Evan is now using an i-LIMB robotic prosthetic that gives him much of the same functionality as a real arm does. It’s not quite as complex as a Luke arm, but it does feature “thought control,” in that it senses tendon movements destined for the nonexistent fingers and translates them into movement of the robotic fingers. This makes the i-LIMB responsive and easy to use without extensive training:

“The most amazing thing about it was how quickly I adapted to it. People always ask how it’s changed my life, but there’s no specific thing. It’s the hundreds of everyday things you take for granted, which I can do again, like peeling a potato, catching a ball, holding a bottle of water.”

“It’s so sensitive I can grip a bottle of water or a paper cup without crushing it, and even swing a racket. All I have to so is imagine picking something up or gripping it and the fingers and thumb move automatically.”

The i-LIMB is designed by Touch Bionics, and it costs about $42,000 including the fitting.

[ Telegraph ] VIA [ Geekologie ]

If, like Zaphod Beeblebrox, you’ve been looking for a way to impress Earth chicks and do better at exotic (i.e. extra-galactic) sports, it might be worth getting yourself fitted with a third arm. STELARC (an Austrian performance artist) has the solution, with a robotic arm designed to be attached to one of your existing arms. The hand is controlled through leg and abdominal nerve signals, and features 290 degree wrist rotation, pinching and grasping motions, and some kind of simple tactile feedback system.

Now, from what I can tell, this thing is actually from back around 1992, or (gasp) earlier, and was only a performance piece. Even so, just imagine the possibilities… STELARC’s thesis is that our bodies are already just extensions of our mind, so adding technology to our bodies is a logical next step. Oh, and we’re zombies, too:

“Bodies are both Zombies and Cyborgs. We have never had a mind of our own and we often perform involuntary conditioned and externally prompted. Ever since we evolved as hominids and developed bipedal locomotion, two limbs became manipulators and we constructed artifacts, instruments and machines. In other words, we have always been coupled with our technology. We have always been prosthetic bodies. We fear the involuntary and we are becoming increasingly involuntary and extended. But we fear what we have always been and what we have already become – Zombies and Cyborgs.”

Hoooo-kay. There are a couple more interesting cyborg-y projects on the STELARC website (including a weird sort of hexapod exoskeleton thing), and if you do a search on YouTube you can find a couple (kinda lame) vids of some of the stuff in action.

[ STELARC ] VIA [ Gizmowatch ]

In February, we learned about Dean Kamen’s amazing Luke robotic prosthetic arm, which is way, way, way better than the current standard for prosthetic limbs. It looks like DEKA has put more than a little work into the arm system since then, focusing on what is probably the trickiest (and most important) aspect: how the user interacts with and controls the system.

The arm itself has 18 degrees of freedom, which is nearly as many as a human arm has. That’s a lot of control, which is great, but it becomes that much harder for the arm to be controlled. For most people, sensors on the arm read muscle signals from neurons in the upper body to determine what the user wants the arm to do. DEKA’s system adapts the arm to the user, rather than vice versa, and also allows for the use of macros to make common or repetitive tasks easier to accomplish. DEKA is also working on arms controlled directly with the brain, and part of the above video shows just how effective such an approach can be, as a man uses his mind to lift a cup to his mouth and take a drink, and then sets the cup down again without conscious thought. Simply incredible.

[ DEKA @ D6 ] VIA [ Gizmodo ]

If you’re not familiar with Dean Kamen, you should be: although he’s best known for inventing the Segway, he has also invented all sorts of other robotic and medical devices, and currently runs FIRST (a robotics/engineering organization for students) as well the Deka Research & Development Corporation (he also knows a thing or two about sci-fi). Deka has been working on the “Luke” robotic prosthesis on a DARPA grant; it’s designed to be a readily available and easily customizable replacement arm “for people who want to literally strap it on and go.” Most prosthetic arms currently available are so ineffectual that amputees just give up on them, and because the market is so small (only about 6,000 are needed every year) there isn’t much financial incentive for large companies to develop an effective technology.

Thanks to a two year, $18 million DARPA grant, Deka has managed to create a modular robotic arm that’s the same size, shape, and weight as a human arm that sports 18 degrees of freedom, only 4 less than a human arm has. The arm is fully self-contained, with internal motors, batteries, and circuit boards that have been folded up to save space. The interface can either be surgical (the user controls the arm through existing nerves) or mechanical (a small joystick controls the arm and provides vibration feedback to indicate grip strength). As you can see, it’s amazingly effective when it comes to precision and dexterity:

The future of the Luke arm is, at the moment, in doubt… In order for the arm to be commercialized, it has to be approved by the FDA, which means costly clinical trials that aren’t covered by the DARPA grant. Deka needs to find some additional funding somewhere (maybe from other government sources) to complete the trials and move the arm on to a manufacturer. Now that the bulk of the R&D is more or less finished, the Luke arm could be on the market in as few as two years, if the FDA approves. The cost? Likely somewhere north of the $100,000 that current state of the art prosthetic arms go for, but for those 6,000 people every year, I can only imagine that it would be worth it.

[ Deka ] VIA [ IEEE ]

By Evan Ackerman

Maybe it’s not technically a robot arm, but this mechanical prosthetic (bionic, almost) arm in development by Vanderbilt University is scary looking enough to fit most of my personal criteria. Especially when it’s packin’ heat. And even when it’s not holding a gun it’s packin’ heat, since it’s powered by a hydrogen peroxide fueled rocket motor. When a cartridge of hydrogen peroxide is mixed with a catalyst, it transforms into high temperature steam, which drives computer controlled pistons to move the arm. One cartridge provides enough power for about 18 hours of normal use, and excess steam is vented through the surface of the arm as artificial sweat.

This prototype arm offers a number of advantages over current models, including substantially increased speed and strength and a far greater range of flexibility, allowing the arm to pour water our of a bottle and even throw a ball. Click here for a video of the arm doing just that. The designers are hoping to get a piece of DARPA funding to continue development as part of the Revolutionizing Prosthetics 2009 program.

[ Rocket Powered Prosthetic Arm ] VIA [ Physorg ]