| Responding to feedback from
disabled users that they wanted “zero gap” in mobility and object manipulation
between them and an unimpaired person, a team at the Center of Excellence
for Remote and Under-Served Areas at St. Francis University has been pioneering
a robotic wheelchair that provides two-arm manipulation capability for
people with disabilities.
The Personal Mobility and
Manipulation Appliance (PerMMA) is under development by the St. Francis
team in partnership with the NSF-funded Quality of Life Technology (QoLT)
Engineering Research Center, which is headquartered at Carnegie Mellon
University and the University of Pittsburgh.
PerMMA was first shown in
action at the May 29, 2008 Showcase for Commerce in Johnstown, Pennsylvania.
Started in 1991 as a local exhibition of area businesses, the Showcase
for Commerce is now the largest business and industry show and premier
defense contracting exhibit in the region. Wounded war veteran and
then-Congressman John P. Murtha attended the event and had the opportunity
to see PerMMA demonstrated.
PerMMA also made several
high-profile public appearances in 2009, helping to draw attention to QoLT’s
mission of improving quality of life for the elderly and for people with
disabilities, through the use of intelligent assistive technologies.
On July 9, 2009, QoLT showcased PerMMA at an event hosted by Senator Harry
Reid on Capitol Hill and organized by the NSF Cyber Physical Systems Program.
QoLT graduate student Ben Salatin and PerMMA were then featured on the
cover of the August 2009 issue of the American Journal of Physical Medicine
and Rehabilitation.
The objective of PerMMA is
to combine manipulation and mobility assistance with perception and decision
making, so that PerMMA can intelligently anticipate and meet user needs.
Capable of opening and closing
doors and retrieving objects, PerMMA is a multi-disciplinary project that
combines mobility, bimanual robotic manipulation, machine perception, path
planning, controls, and user interface to create an integrated system.
PerMMA will offer greater independence to individuals with mobility and
upper extremity impairments by allowing them to perform tasks in both their
home and community that would otherwise require the assistance of others.
No devices of this nature currently exist. For many people with disabilities,
essential tasks such as dressing, shopping, and food preparation require
the assistance of an attendant. PerMMA aims to address these needs,
thus allowing the user to be more independent, and reducing or eliminating
the need for caregiver assistance. |
