At our Center for Autonomous Systems there is work being done on
"reflexes" for electric wheelchairs, so that they can avoid bumping into
doorjambs when passing through a door.
A legged wheelchair is likely more trouble than its worth at present;
we already live in a wheel-friendly environment, and legged locomotion
is hard and involves many many moving parts. The exoskeleton is a nice
idea but to my knowledge it has some problems with both getting power
and being light.
Chuck Kuecker <ckuecker@mcs.net> writes:
> A couple years ago, I saw a TV show about medical advances where they had a
> paraplegic woman "walking" with a computer "driving" her leg muscles. This
> kind of technology should be applicable to a mechanical set of legs as well.
>
> Anyone hear about whether this is going anywhere?
Functional Electric Stimulation, FES. Yes, it is going somewhere (no pun
intended). However, this kind of research takes a lot of time.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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