EMG controlled Robotic leg for amputee bike riders

Back in the period of 2013-2015, I connected with some amputees in a facebook group to understand what their needs are. There are some robotic legs out there but there are none that give them the capability to ride a bike and change the gears with almost the power of thought. EMG technology we developed helps in reading muscle signals from the remaining un-amputated portion of leg and uses this signal to control the foot of the robotic leg, so that they can use this leg to ride a bike and change gears. It comes with dual IMU to see that its pose is stabilized to be horizontal with the gear pedal of the bike no matter what posture the amputee rider gets into the leg will self adjust and keep helping in changing gears. We wrote our own noise immunity algorithm to overcome the jitters and uncertainties in the EMG signal. The mechanical fabrication was a custom job by us, we use off the shelf linear actuators and integrated it into a Custom solution. This work was published in BioRob 2020

Sriranjan Rasakatla, Ikuo Mizuuchi, Bipin Indurkhya. An EMG Leg for Amputee Bikers with Gear Control, Late Breaking Abstracts at 8th IEEE RAS/EMBS International Conference on Biomedical Robotics and Biomechatronics, 2020.

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Snake robot with sound source localization capability

We built a snake robot here at Mizuuchi lab where we equipped it with sound source localization system using multiple microphones on its body so that it with its multiple changing postures in its body can identify and locate the help cries coming from survivors stuck under the debris in a search and rescue scenario.

In India Snake charmers from a long time have been using a winded musical instrument called the Pungi to attract the attention of a biological snake and make it so to say dance to its tunes. So we tried a digital form of snake charming using a bluetooth speaker as the sound source and made the snake robot track with its body and head in near real time the direction from which the sound was coming.

We sent this work to prestigious RA-L (Robotics and Automation Letters, BioRob 2022).

Dual camera system to search for people under debris with a cockroach

I further worked on equipping the cyborg cockroach with a dual camera system to be able to help detect humans with cyborg insects by identifying human skin temperature with a thermal camera and see the corresponding visual wavelength image with its twin WiFi camera. Both the visual wavelength and thermal camera operate over an onboard WiFi server. Any client device like a laptop, tablet or mobile phone can see the telemetry video coming from the cyborg insect using a browser or our custom developed LibCurl OpenCV application. The cyborg cockroach is also equipped with the world’s smallest and lightweight GPS system to report its position over WiFi. This work was published in IEEE-ROBIO conference 2021

WiFi enabled Search and Rescue Cyborg cockroach with neural control and WiFi enabled camera

Since 2019, I have been working on equipping a cockroach with a miniature camera and control it with neural stimulation to guide it through tight spaces. We at Mizuuchi lab from Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology under the guidance of Dr.Ikuo Mizuuchi, Dr. Takeshi Suzuki and Dr.Bipin Indurkhya developed this miniature cyborg insect system. We collaborated with the Bio Applications and Systems engineering department for the surgery on the cockroach.

This work was published in 2021 and 2022

CameraRoach: A WiFi- and Camera-Enabled Cyborg Cockroach for Search and Rescue

Noodle cooking robot (at Connected Robotics Company) where I played an integral role in develop it

Back in 2020 when I was working as an intern to support myself financially during the course of PhD here at Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology, I got the opportunity to work on the development of a Noodle cooking robot called the SOBA robot. Soba is a very famous type of noodles here in Japan. I along with my good colleague Shota Ohkubo with the supervision of the Founder and President Tez Swanobori and that time chief manager Koji Itano developed this entire system. My role was in developing the electromagnetic gripper, software routines to program the robot, the UI (hardware and software) interaction system.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRR9PZb_7Sw&t=135s .This video was aired live in NHK WORLD in 2021 all over the world.

Cyborg Insects for Search and Rescue

Cyborg insects have been an area of research for quite some time. One of the applications of cyborg insects has been for search and rescue. We intend to make a wireless WiFi camera based neurally controlled cyborg insect so that it  can be sent into the debris or rubble in a search and rescue scenario for finding people stuck under the debris. Here is a hardware technology video demo of our “WiFi CameraRoach.”

https://youtu.be/ErKbuxTxGRU

 

Dreams are ripples of consciousness shared from a parallel universe…

Dreams are ripples of consciousness shared from a parallel universe…

Deep space Interstellar array of Satellites

Since no single satellite will have enough power to transmit from an interstellar space we can use an array of deep space satellite. Each satellite will hop the signal from the farthest satellite to earth. Each of the intermediate satellite can be put on geo stationary orbit around the 9 planets and when they come to line of sight with earth then they can be synced to turn their power on just for the signal to be hopped and relayed. And even without a sophisticated navigation system in the farthest satellite using a timer counter (which itself could be a real time clock) and the estimated speed of satellite we can detect at what distance the farthest satellite from earth is and know if and whether it has reached interstellar space and has left the heliopause.  So this by having an array of deep space satellites we can send a signal to and fro to interstellar space. And that is how we can get an Interstellar ping (atleast one of the ways, there even other ways).

Interstellar ping

Can we design an spacecraft/probe that can reach Interstellar space and pin back. Well Voyager-2 did reach interstellar space but can we design a powerful enough antenna with a power source and onboard navigation system where the navigation system would detect that it has reached interstellar space and then turns on the communication system to ping back to Earth. Would be an exciting project to work on…

Time travel…

One note about time travel. Well one would always like to see how the world would look like 200-300 years from now, what new gadgets would be invented, basically how the canvas of life would be 200-300 years from now and would there be time travel in the future. Well I feel sad that I would not be alive to see all this and that itself is a cause for depression but this remarkable thing about time travel if it gets invented, one need to be alive till time travel is invented. If at any point in time time travel does get invented then it would should be present throughout the entire time, even time before it was invented because it is about traveling through time, it would be present all along the length of time, if you imagine take as a ruler then it would be there even from marking zero and no matter how long the ruler is you could always get there..So time travel is a hope for life beyond the limited period of one being born and one dying. So if one time travels can one say one lives forever? The answer is both yes and no. Because you can move all along all the ruler (the physical instrument to measure length) of time but if you do a scalar sum of the instances/periods you spend when you stopped traveling each time then that would be a limited period. Say I live for 20 years in the years1900-1920, then another 20 years in the years 2300-2320, another 30 in years 3400-3430 and you die in 3430 because your life expectancy with your aging/diseased body is 20+20+30 = 70 years you might say I was alive from the year 1900 till the year 3430 and experience life to see all the inventions, cultural changes etc from 1900 to3430  you dint live for 3430 -1900 = 1530 years but lived for only 70 years. The example was a bit sparse in timing but say you spent 1 hour in each month from 1900 (the year you were born) and after you spend an hour in the current month you immediately time traveled to the next immediate month spent, another hour in the next month and you keep doing till all these one hours add upto 70 years in life then how many years and till what year did you live? Let me calculate that, 70 years x 365 days x 24 hours = 613200 hours is the total time for which you can be alive. And you spend 12 hours a year living that year then it is 6132000/12 = 51,100 years for which you are alive and you die in the year 1900+51,100= 53,000. Now since you experienced life each month continuously in this example it is not as sparse as the previous example and in a way you can say I lived for 51,100 years not just 70 i.e you can outlive your life expectancy with time travel. (If one says oh, I can give you a better example, I am smarter than you, I say I live 1 second each month and time travel to the next month and live another second then I live much longer…but the philosophical question is are you experiencing life in these years, it is the same philosophical difference between a digital and an analog signal, what would be your delta (incremental difference) at which you will approximate a digital signal to a near analog signal…