TI to showcase Bionic Arm

MUMBAI: Texas Instruments Inc. (TI) will showcase the world’s first thought controlled ‘Bionic Arm’ at the Texas Instruments Developers Conference India to be held from Nov 30 to Dec 1, 2006 at Bangalore.

The Boston Digital Arm from Liberating Technologies (Massachusetts, USA) is driven using electrical or myoelectric signals. To date, artificial arms have been mechanically controlled requiring users to physically control artificial arms by flexing their shoulders to actuate a pulley system.

The arm is dramatically more flexible and capable than most prosthetic devices, due to the control optimized performance and integration offered by TI’s TMS320C2000 DSP based digital signal controllers.

“When Liberating Technologies developed their system, they considered both MCUs and digital signal controllers,” said Andrew Soukup, C2000 marketing manager, TI. “They selected TI’s C2000 controllers because of their vastly superior abilities to generate pulse width modulated (PWM) signals for the most efficient method of driving the DC motors that are used in prostheses. One TI digital signal controller gave Liberating Technologies the ability to drive five motors, expandable to nine with an add-on module. In contrast, some competing solutions require two MCUs to drive only three motors.”

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