Ultrasonic Tracking of the Ulnar Nerve
On this project, me and my team developed a 8 degree of freedom system that can hold a ultrasonic sensor and map the path of a patients arm. This system will combine the path data and ultrasound data to research the attachment of the Ulnar Nerve to the elbow and surrounding tissue, and improve the surgical practices for fixing Ulnar Nerve damage. We brought our completed project the University of Pittsburgh Design Expo, where we placed 1st in the Mechanical Engineering Department.
Intergrated System and Robot Arm
Complete System
This is a full representation of the 3 full systems that were created from scratch for this semester long project, a 6-DOF Robotic arm, which was fully brainstormed, designed, and built by our team, a 2-DOF commonly used on the X-Carve CNC Carving machine, and a full 8020 frame with a custom made elbow and wrist support for the patients arm.
Robotic Arm Close-up
The robotic arm was my major contribution to the team, I designed and ideated each component to fit together, and then 3-D printed every component on the last 3 joints. I then designed the 3 base parts out of aluminum, which was then machined by our machine shop, and I assembled everything in the semester long deadline.
Robotic Arm Iterations CAD
Robot Arm Iteration V1
This was the result of our initial idea generation, using the the unique shape of the required end effector to dictate the joints on the upper half of the arm, as well as accommodate the spacing required for the moving plane below the arm.
Robot Arm Iteration V2
This was a continuation of the work, nailing down the full degrees of freedom, and allowing for a full 3-D printed prototype.
Robot Arm Iteration V3
This is the full final model, which includes all of the motors, bearings and structural components required for the full 6 DOF. The motors were incorporated into the design to speed up future iterations of the system, even though we were not able to program or control any of these motors.
Award Ceremony and Team Pictures
TrackingVideo.mp4Code Creation
The video pictured here shows the graphical interface version of our plotting code, which takes voltage inputs from the 6 potentiometers and performs forward kinematics using Denavit-Hartenberg matrices to calculate the position of the end affector and each subsequent joint, and then plot it in real time. I have also created a script that takes this positional data, and uses third order spline interpolation to calculate every path coordinate vector, the radius of curvature, and the torsion of every point along the measured path.
LINK TO GITHUB: https://github.com/bmoyer45113/ulnarNerveMATLAB/tree/329979a506ad8c378bc1c5133b18480cf13b0470