The Robotics/Mechanics Core:

Core Directors: James Patton, PhD, Yasin Dhaher, PhD and Sandro Mussa-Ivaldi, PhD

  1. Facilities under this core are equipped with state-of-the-art lower and upper extremity robotic devices. These include the Manipulandum robot, an RIC planar machine called the reaching guide, the Phantom® 3.0 , the Haptic Master®, the  WAM® (a novel back-drivable, three-dimensional robotics system), several WREX passive robots for gravity support of the arm, the KineAssist® and the Lokomat® which is a motor driven exoskeleton device that employs a body weight support suspension system combined with a split-belt instrumented treadmill (Adal®).

  2. Researchers utilize these technologies to: 

  1. address basic science and engineering questions,
  2. as diagnostic tools, and
  3. to test therapeutic approaches to stroke and spinal cord injury.

Another significant resource under this core is our Motion Analysis Laboratory.  The laboratory is equipped with an eight-camera digital, real-time, motion capture system from Motion Analysis Corporation (MAC, Santa Rosa, CA) that is used to measure movement kinematics.  The laboratory has three AMTI (Boston, MA) force platforms for measuring ground reaction forces as subjects walk across them and has an sixteen-channel EMG system (Motion Lab Systems Baton Rouge, LA) for recording muscle activity during movements, and foot switches for the identification of stance phase events during walking. All of the measurement systems in the laboratory are integrated with each other to allow for the synchronized collection of data in order to provide a comprehensive overview of the particular human movement activity.

The Coleman Computational Biomechanics Laboratory is the focal point of computational mechanics research at ENRP. The laboratory is equipped with six workstations with high-speed dual processors and large capacity RAM and hard drives. The six computers are also configured to operate as a cluster under the linux operating system.  Hypermesh software is available to generate geometric finite element meshes from magnetic resonance images, finite element analysis program, ABAQUS , is used in the laboratory for modeling of joint mechanics under static and dynamic conditions. The computational laboratory also has five software licenses for Software for Interactive Musculoskeletal Modeling (SIMM) used to create computer models of musculoskeletal structures (single/multi-joint musculoskeletal models). SIMM is an interactive graphic tool used to enhance our understanding of the musculoskeletal biomechanics through the visualization of human movement and analysis of the functional capacity of muscles in normal and pathological states.