Flow control and efficiency: Improvement of fluid-driven actuators to build soft gloves for rehabilitation

The current project aims at designing a soft-robotic wearable glove which is applicable for rehabilitation of patients with loss of motor function in one or both hands. The wearable glove takes advantage of a set of different fluid-driven actuators. In order to design the actuators, flow control technique and also combine a set of actuators to use in the wearable glove, it is required to precisely analyze the fluid-solid interaction (FSI) between the actuator flexible body and the driving fluid. For this purpose, a computational module will be developed and used to analyze the fluid flow motion and FSI in the fluid-driven actuator and design a set of controllable actuators used in a wearable glove. The functionality of the developed computational module will be validated through comparison of basic benchmark test cases and also laboratory results obtained in the company. Then, it will be used to design and analyze the final product which is going to be a wearable soft robotic rehabilitation glove.

Faculty Supervisor:

Kourosh Zareinia

Student:

Mohammad Saeedi

Partner:

Tactile Robotics Ltd

Discipline:

Engineering - mechanical

Sector:

Professional, scientific and technical services

University:

Ryerson University