A 19 year old recent high school graduate who built a $350 robotic arm controlled with thoughts is showing any one how to build it free. His goal is to let anybody who is missing an arm use the robotic arm at a vastly cheaper cost than a prosthetic limb that can cost tens of thousands of dollars.
When he was 14, Easton LaChappelle built a robotic hand controlled by a wireless control glove. He used LEGOs to back the device, motors from toy airplanes, fishing line for the tendons, and electrical tubing for the fingers.
Mr. LaChappelle entered the robotic hand into a the 2011 Colorado State science fair where he won third place. He says his inspiration for the hand hit him when he met a 7-year old girl who was born without her right arm. She used a prosthetic limb that cost $80,0000. He immediately began to work on a dramatically cheaper alternative.
While perfecting his robotic hand, Mr. LaChappelle contacted a popular YouTube user, with over 90,000 subscribers, called Jeremy Blum, who fixed the programming code that allowed the control glove to wirelessly communicate with the hand.
Aiming to make the hand as inexpensively as possible, Mr. LaChappelle bought an old Nintendo Power Glove and used its sensors. Watch as Mr. LaChapelle showcased the second version of the robotic hand that he entered into his sophomore year science fair.
Now it was time to turn this hand into a fully-operational robotic arm. He wanted to significantly improve on his original design, so he found out it would cost him around $500 to have it made by local 3D printing services. Too much for a high school student on a potato chip budget.
Mr. Blum, who worked with MakerBot (a company that sells 3D printers), had access to its $1200 Thing-O-Matic 3D printer. So Mr. Blum told Mr. LaChappelle how to make his designs for the robotic arm best work with the Thing-O-Matic. Then Mr. Blum would print the parts Mr. LaChappelle designed and shipped them to Colorado where Mr. LaChappelle lived.
Mr. Blum also taught Mr. LaChappelle how to make the arm’s motors stop when it was in the desired position. To do this, Mr. LaChappelle connected potentiometers (which are used to control electrical devices like audio controls and light dimmers) to DC motors on the robotic arm. This turned these motors to servos that allowed the robotic arm to do practically anything a human hand could, like shake hands, and throw balls.
Mr. LaChapelle was invited to present the arm at the third annual White House Science Fair, where it shook hands with U.S. President Barack Obama.
One of Mr. LaChapelle’s objectives is to avoid making something that would require surgery to gain neurological control.
“That’s dangerous, and also costs a lot of money; I don’t have money to do that,” Mr. LaChappelle said at his presentation at Ted in 2013. “I wanted to find a compromise.”
For his latest version, Mr. LaChappelle developed an EEG headset that reads 10 different channels of a human brain. So now his robotic arm and hand can be controlled by a person’s thoughts, which Mr. LaChappelle argues is a huge psychological benefit for users.
In the video, you could see a retired business owner who lost his right arm in an accident grab a light bulb with the robotic arm while wearing a headset that reads his brainwaves.