Seminar: Getting Hands-On with Wearable Robotics for Augmenting Human Capabilities / Summer Term 2023

Description

Body-worn robots hold great promise for assisting users in physical tasks and augmenting their perception in unique ways. It can be expected that a variety of wearable robotic devices will soon find their way to end-users and become a relevant new platform for interactive computing.

Pioneering work has shown various forms of body-worn robots. For instance, these include wearable robotic arms that extend the human body with a third arm, exoskeletons that assist human movement and enhance human strength, or robots that freely move along the human body to assist with everyday tasks. Usage contexts range from assisting the elderly or users with specific needs, supporting workers in professional contexts, all the way to applications for mass users in everyday life, such as carrying heavy bags, new opportunities for sports, or to improve the immersiveness of applications in Virtual Reality.

The goal of this seminar is to acquire basic practical skills in building a Wearable Robot for human use, using Do-it-Yourself methods and Digital Fabrication tools alongside Arduino microcontrollers.
– In groups of three, you will design and implement a working robot that can take form of a wearable robotic arm or an exoskeleton.
– You will have the opportunity to design your own creative application case that your robot will enable, for instance to support applications in Virtual and Augmented Reality, assistive interfaces, interfaces for sports, or other domains.
– The seminar will conclude with a hands-on demo showcase where student teams can present their robots.

Activities

This seminar combines conceptual basics and theory with a practical team project: Participants will work in small groups on a practical project.
Creativity, ideation, and experimentation will be essential aspects of the project phase. We will present a list of potential project topics during the kick-off session. Students can choose from these or propose their own ideas for projects. Our experience is that developing your own solution within a team of students can be a lot of fun and lead to impressive results; some of our past student projects have gained remarkable attention on the web and even have received awards (see for instance Interactive Jacket for Cyclists, Interactive Dancing Socks, Ambient Flower, Sprinter). We’ll help you to realize a great project.

Registration

Please note that because of the close individual supervision the number of participants is limited to 18!  Please register through the seminar portal offered by the computer science department
https://seminars.cs.uni-saarland.de/sose23seminars . This is a master-level seminar, which can also be taken by Bachelor students from 5th study semester and above.

For the registration, we require you to submit a brief motivation statement that elaborates on why you want to take this class and what relevant projects and courses you have taken before. As our topics involve hardware, you are required to have basic experience in hardware programming (e.g., Arduino) and simple electronics (at the level taught in the Interactive Systems lecture).
It’s advantageous but not strictly required to have passed Interactive Systems and/or HCI.

People

Prof. Dr. Jürgen Steimle

Marie Mühlhaus
Artin Saberpour
Ata Otaran

Contact

saberpour@cs.uni-saarland.de