Grant: Research Tools and Instruments - Category 1 (<$150,000)

This grant provides funding for a motion capture system at the University of Waterloo to enable experiments and analysis of human movements in multiple research programs in biomechanics, robotics, and rehabilitation engineering. Analysis of human movement will lead to improved understanding of the mechanisms for human balance and other human movements. Measurements of human motion are also vital for developing and evaluating technologies for assistive devices, rehabilitation and sports training. Understanding human motion is also valuable in robotics applications, where knowledge of human movement can be used by the robot to imitate and achieve new behaviours, anticipate human motion and improve safety. The motion capture system consists of 8 high speed cameras, which are used to track reflective markers placed on key locations on the human body as a human subject moves around the workspace. The system allows the position and velocity of each part of the human body to be measured accurately during movement, allowing data to be collected for a wide variety of human motions and activities, including walking and running, everyday movements performed in home settings, movements performed during work activities, such as assembly tasks in manufacturing, as well as sports training and rehabilitation exercises. The system is also capable of online measurements, providing accurate human position data in real-time. This will allow experiments with direct human-robot interaction, where the robot learns and imitates movements as they are performed by the human demonstrator, and anticipates known movements by the demonstrator. For example, a worker could use the system to train the robot to perform a manufacturing assembly task simply by demonstrating the task to the robot. The system would also allow a human operator to control a robot as the robot carries out a task. This would be useful for remote robot control (teleoperation), where the human operator's hand and arm motions are tracked by the cameras at the motion capture studio, and the task is simultaneously performed by the robot in a remote hazardous environment.