Thesis Project Form

Differently from traditional human oriented robotic technologies like prosthetics to substitute lost limbs or exoskeletons to assist human limbs, wearable robotics is a newly emerging research direction towards augmenting human capabilities. In this realm the Robotic Sixth Finger is a wearable supernumerary robotic finger developed by the University of Siena, designed for compensating reduced hand capability in patients with paretic upper limbs, e.g. stroke patients.

The Robotic Sixth Finger enables a hybrid grasp but is currently controlled in a two-state mode: open or close. The goal is to develop an eye-based user interface for more natural operability in grasping tasks. The process will follow steps of increasing complexity. Initially, a wearable eye-tracking system will be combined with a marker-based MOCAP system to fine-tune the eye-based control. Next, marker-less MOCAP will be introduced to make the system fully wearable and portable. Finally, AI-based object recognition will be integrated to estimate the size, dimensions, and shape of reachable targets, optimizing the dynamics of the Sixth Finger. A series of experiments will be conducted to demonstrate its effectiveness in enhancing human hand capabilities. These experiments will also explore whether and how the Sixth Finger alters motor body representations, adapting to changes in a user’s action repertoire.

Eye tracking
Hand tracking
Conduction of psychophysical experiments.
Data analysis in MATLAB/R and interpretation of results.