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Executive Summary:

Neuromuscular disorders affect millions of people worldwide. Those affected typically suffer from motor function complications such as trembling and loss of fine motor control. This makes accomplishing ordinary tasks difficult and results in a loss of independence for those afflicted. Additionally, the impact of losing one's sense of self-reliance takes an emotional toll which further complicates a person's quality of life. In response, our team aims to tackle one aspect of daily life: self feeding. Our mission is to create a cheap, safe, and open source feeding arm to assist those with neuromuscular disabilities.

This report details the design process of our feeding mechanism (pick and place mechanism to address our design challenge.) This includes our the kinematic analysis of our initial design, iterative design reviews, the manufacturing process, and ultimately our final solution. All CAD and source code files are provided in the Appendices appendices of our report.

Project Goals:

In order to accomplish a cheap, safe, and open source design, the following constraints were considered and adhered to.

• Cheap:
  • Use a single motor to control the entire feeding process
  • Refine close loop control – limited sensor acquisition
  • Use cheap and readily available materials
• Safe:
  • On and off button to control the mechanism
  • Controlled velocity and acceleration profile of arm mechanism
• Open Source:
  • All source code is made available on the RMD wiki and GitHub
  • All CAD files are made available on the RMD wiki and GitHub
  • The comprehensive parts list is available on the RMD wiki