Ada

ADA, the Assistive Dextrous Arm, mimics equipment used in real homes by people with mobility impairments. It consists of a Kinova JACO robotic arm mounted on a powered ROVI Mobility wheelchair. It is the main platform for our research thrust on assistive robotics and, specifically, robot-assisted feeding for people with upper-extremity impairments. The arm has 2 fingers that grasp a fork with a 3D-printed fork holder. For haptic feedback, it can either use the Forque, a fork instrumented with a 6-axis ATI Nano25 Force-Torque sensor, or a custom tactile sensor. For visual feedback, we designed a custom mount for the Intel RealSense D415 and Jetson Nano to wirelessly transmit RGB-D video.