Clients
Medical Device Development Facility
University of Southern California
Professor Gerald E. Loeb, CEO of SynTouch and Director of the Medical Device Development Facility in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at USC, uses the BioTac to understand haptics by developing robots that mimic exploratory behaviors and perception by humans. Reductionist neurophysiological methods to study other senses (e.g. vision, hearing) are not applicable to haptics because few animals have manual dexterity and it is difficult to train or even observe these behaviors. Professor Loeb uses the biomimetic BioTac as an artificial model of human touch to develop and test theories of haptics and to improve the haptic capabilities of mechatronic systems.
Penn Haptics Group
University of Pennsylvania
Dr. Katherine J. Kuchenbecker and the Penn Haptics Group create haptic interfaces that enable highly realistic interactions with virtual and remote environments, especially for medical applications. Their group simultaneously works on endowing autonomous robots with a high degree of touch-based intelligence to better perform tasks in unstructured environments. Toward this end, they worked with SynTouch to integrate a pair of BioTac sensors with the Willow Garage PR2, a highly capable two-armed humanoid robot. In collaboration with UC Berkeley and with funding from DARPA, the Penn Haptics Group is working to on the problem of perceptually grounded robotic language acquisition. More specifically, their BioTac-enabled PR2 is learning the meaning of a variety of haptic adjectives (e.g., soft, rough, fuzzy) by using exploratory procedures to touch objects with different physical properties.
Biomechatronics Lab
Arizona State University
Dr. Veronica J. Santos and the Biomechatronics Lab are currently developing a multi-level control system that maintains voluntary control at the higher human level, but implements autonomous "survival behaviors" at the lower machine level to address communication delays in human-machine systems. These survival behaviors can be implemented with sensory-event driven artificial reflexes that are inspired by human grip responses. The Biomechatronics Lab is also pursuing haptic exploration strategies for autonomous robotic systems with multi-digit robot hands outfitted with BioTacs.
Sensorimotor Research Group
Arizona State University
Dr. Stephen Helms Tillery and the SMoRG Lab are developing cortical interfaces for neuroprosthetics and is currently using the BioTac to study sensory feedback. In particular, the group is focused on two aspects of cortical neuroprosthetics: 1) what are the abilities and limitations that come about due to neural plasticity and adaptation, and 2) how could tactile information be input back into the central nervous system.