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		Biorobotics and Biomechanics Lab

Research Projects

A Low-Cost Haptic Feedback Interface for a 3D Printed Prosthetic Hand

Yair Herbst, Derick Sivakumaran, Yoav Medan, and Alon Wolf

For children who lack an upper limb, the usage of a prosthesis is a promising way to improve the quality of life. However, rejection rate amongst users of prosthetic devices is high, besides other causes, due to high cost, high weight, lack of social acceptance and lack of sensor...

A medical snake like robot for single port surgery

Alon Wolf, Howie Choset, Marco Zenati (Pittsburgh USA)

Prof. Wolf co-founder and inventor

The Flex® Robotic System is based on a core flexible, steerable scope technology that surgeons can use to navigate around anatomy with an integrated high-definition vision system. Once positioned, the scope can become rigid to pro...

An Adaptive Virtual Biofeedback System for Rehabilitation

Ouriel Barzilay, Oded Solomon, Alon Wolf

Every day, physical therapy helps a considerable number of people recover from surgical operations, strokes, or injuries. Physiotherapy tends to develop, maintain, and restore maximal movement and functionality to the patient. For this purpose, the physiotherapist has to tailor specific p...

Analysis and Synthesis of Barn Owl 3D-Scanning Kinematics

Ouriel Barzilay, Alon Wolf, Lihi Zelnik-Manor, Yoram Gutfreund

Barn owls use stereovision to detect small prey in dimly lit conditions. In barn owls the eyes are largely fixed in the skull, therefore, saccades to objects of interest are performed by head movements. However, in addition to the rapid head saccades, barn owls exhibit a variety of other stereoty...

Analysis of Subject Specific Grasping Patterns

Yair Herbst, Lihi Zelnik-Manor, Alon Wolf

The rapid development and adoption of virtual and augmented reality headsets highlight the need for haptic feedback devices capable of improving the user experience. The current existing...

Biomechanics of gait pattern adaptation in patients after Total Knee Arthroplasty

Eytan Debbie, Alon Wolf

Arthritis is ranked third, after cancer and heart disease, as a major health concern for Americans, preceding other diseases such as stroke, high blood pressure and diabetes. Osteoarthritis (OA) is the most prevalent type of arthritis and most commonly affects the knee joint. Knee osteoarthritis (KO...

Bone Pose Estimation in the Presence of Soft Tissue Artifact Using Triangular Cosserat Point Elements

Dana Solav, MB Rubin, Andrea Cereatti, Valentina Camomilla, Alon Wolf

Accurate estimation of the position and orientation (pose) of a bone from a cluster of skin markers is limited mostly by the relative motion between the bone and the markers, which is known as the Soft Tissue Artifact (STA). This work presents a method, based on continuum mechanics, to describe t...

CHEST WALL KINEMATICS USING TRIANGULAR COSSERAT POINT ELEMENTS IN HEALTHY AND NEUROMUSCULAR SUBJECTS

Dana Solav

INTRODUCTION:

Optoelectronic plethysmography (OEP) has shown to be a reliable and accurate method for measuring lung volume changes during breathing in various positions and conditions. OEP enables the detection of asynchronous and asymmetric movements between the Chest W...

Controlling of a Dexterous Robotic Arm with Grasp Analysis and Automatic Target Following

Josie Gotz, Yaniv Sasson, Adam Wolff

This project involved the building and controlling of a dexterous robotic arm while also investigating the grasping capabilites. Printed entirely from plastic (Gael Langvin, inmoov.fr), each arm has ten degrees of freedom inclduing five for each of the fingers which are all actuated by servo moto...

Development and Validation of a Non-ionizing Radiation Technique to Estimate Spine Posture from Back Surface Topography Using Depth Cameras for the Evaluation of Scoliosis

Biokinematic analysis and assessment of scoliosis both call for measurements of in vivo spine position. This generally requires tomographic imaging which carries significant limitations. Subjects are typically supine rather than upright (Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Computed Tomography) and scanne...

Estimating Spine Structure from Surface Topography

Benjamin Groisser, Ron Kimmel, Alon Wolf

Accurate measurement of spine position is important in various medical contexts, ranging from diagnosis and treatment of scoliosis to prophylaxis or rehabilitation of pathological locomo...

Foot Center of Pressure Manipulation During Gait

Mona Khoury, Alon Wolf

It has been shown in previous studies that footwear generated biomechanical manipulations can alter the trajectory of the center of pressure [COP] thereby altering the location of the ground reaction force and modifying moments and forces acting on proximal body segments. The purpose of this stud...

Graphical Method for Singularity Analysis of Planar Parallel Manipulators

Alon Wolf, Amir Degani

In order to identify singular configurations of planar parallel manipulators (PPM) a new graphical method, which is based on Maxwell’s Reciprocal Theory, is explored. Screw theory and line geometry tools are used to form a new graphical construction called the Mechanism’s Line of Acti...

Haptic Control System for a Robotic Medical System

Yoel Shapiro, Alon Wolf

Robotic medical systems for surgery solve many problems encountered by conventional surgery – they enable the surgeon to apply a different scale of forces, improve his dexterity and accuracy, and can introduce safety features in risky operations. For a robotic medical system to ...

Helping Hands: Low Cost 3D Printed Bionic Hands for Children

Yair Herbst, Shunit Polinsky, Technion, Haifa3D

The Enable community is a distributed, collaborative volunteer effort to design and fabricate upper-limb assistive technology devices for anyone who needs it. The designs created by the community are open-source and the fabrication is done locally using consumer 3D printers. This fabrication para...

Hyper redundant snake robot

Alon Wolf, Oded Solomon, and students

A redundant robot has at least one extra degree of freedom (DOF) than required, in order to compensate for simple constraints, i.e., using an elbow up versus an elbow down configuration, to reach a target position. Hyper-redundant robots have many more DOF than required, enabl...

Kinematics of Continuous Hyper-Redundant Robots

Yoel Shapiro,Gabor Kosa,Alon Wolf

Long, slim robots with multiple joints are often termed 'continuum robots' and usualy have colorful names inspired by the animal kingdom: snakes, elephant trunks or octopus arms. Continuum robots have many degrees of freedom (DOF) and are therefore labeled as ‘Hyper-Redundant-Robots...

Kinematics of Snake locomotion

Alon Wolf

For this research we bring live snakes (don’t worry they are friendly snakes) and study their kinematic and locomotion patterns using our Vicon motion tracking system. We then analyze our data and utilize it to better design the mechanical structure of our snake robots and for p...

Knee Biomechanics

Alon Wolf

There are several, commonly used, definitions for axes when describing knee kinematics, e.g..: mechanical axis, anatomical axis, epicondylar axis, transverse axis, posterior condylar line, Whiteside's line, and axes of rotation of the knee. In order to incorporate both translation and rotatio...

MEMS Kinematics

Hagai Bamberger, Moshe Shoham, Alon Wolf

Manufacturing of micro-robots by MEMS technology may cause large clearance at the joints – only one order of magnitude smaller, and even of the same order of magnitude, as the links themselves. Due to the clearances, the direct kinematic solutions are not discrete, but form a volume that ...

Motion Estimation Using Point Cluster Method and Kalman Filter

Merav Mor, Alon Wolf

The most frequently used method in three dimensional human gait analysis involves placing markers on the skin of the analyzed segment. This introduces a significant artifact which strongly influences the bone position and orientation and joint kinematics estimates. In this ...

Motion planning for hyper redundant snake-like robots

Leav Oz-AriDr. Alon Wolf

This work describes a method of generating gaits for the open-loop control of robots using genetic algorithms.
While similar techniques have been used before on different robots, the focus of this work is in controlling hyper redundant snake-like robots for which motion planning is much mor...

New flexible actuator

Oded Salomon, Alon Wolf

Hyper-redundant robots (HRR) have many more degrees of freedom (DOF) than required, which enable them to handle more constraints, such as those present in highly convoluted volumes. Consequently, they can serve in many robotic applications, while extending the reachability and manoeuvrability of ...

Nonlinear Model Based Estimation of Rigid-Body Motion via an Indirect Measurement of an Elastic Appendage with Application to Biomechanics Studies Background

Merav Mor, Odded gottlieb, Alon Wolf

In this work, we present our first step towards better recognition of bone and joint motion based on skin markers measurements. For this purpose, we develop and implement a nonlinear model-based procedure for estimation of rigid body motion via an indirect measuremen...

Plasticity of locomotor patterns via biomechanical perturbation training:

Amir Haim, Nimrod Rosen, Alon Wolf

The act of walking is an extremely complex endeavor of muscleforces on bones, rotations through multiple joints, and external forces that act on the body. Overall, this task is attained by a proper kinematic trajectory command coordinated by the nervous system to its skel...

Recognizing Knee Pathologies by Classifying Instantaneous Screws of the Six Degrees-of-Freedom Knee Motion

Alon Wolf, Amir Degani

We address the problem of knee pathology assessment by using screw theory to describe the knee motion and by using the screw representation of the motion as an input to a machine learning classifier. The flexions of knees with different pathologies are tracked using an optical tracking system. Th...

Shape Reconstruction of Hyper-Flexible Beams with PVDF Sensros

Yoel Shapiro, Gabor Kosa,Alon Wolf

Hyper flexible beams are very common in continuum manipulators and soft robotics. When working with humans, animals or other delicate objects safety considerations are of primary importance. Using compliant, light weight actuators and structural components yields inher...

The effect of center of pressure alteration on the ground reaction force loading the foot during gait

Hadar Shaulian, Deborah Solomonow-Avnon1, Amir Herman, Nimrod Rozen, Amir Haim, Alon wolf

Background: Foot problems and lower-limb diseases (e.g., foot ulcers, osteoarthritis, etc.), are presented with a ground reaction force (GRF) that may deviate substantially from the normal. Thus, GRF manipulation is a key parameter when treating symptoms of t...

Undergraduate Research Projects

A novel robotic mechanism for climbing in pips with non uniform diameter

Roi Barad, Naty Ronen, Ziv Levi, Uriel Braunshtain, and Alon Wolf

Pipe climbing is a complex task for a robotic system mainly due to ambiguity in pipe geometry, i.e. its diameter and junction of two or more pipes. In order to overcome these uncertainties we have developed a novel robotic structure that is executing an inch like locomotion pattern. This specific...

Hyper redundant hybrid mechanism

Peleg Harel, Alon Wolf

For this project we have designed and constructed a hyper degrees of freedom mechanism composed of multiple 3-DOF parallel robots.

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myFive: a Personalized, Low Cost, Robotic, Myoelectric Prosthetic Hand for Below the Elbow Amputees

Nirel Kakon, Bruno Aronis, Joshua Kahn, Shira Massas, Adiel Frankovitch, Leor Madlal, Mor Harpaz, Iftach Naftaly, Yair Herbst, Yuval Nachshon, Zohar Or

The myFive Prosthetic Hand is a 3D printed, myoelectric, robotic prosthetic hand. It is designed to provide a solution for amputees with a below-the- elbow amputation. Currently available prosthetics of this type are hard to get and very expensive (around $40,000), which makes them impractical fo...