Engineering Students Create a Robotic Arm to help a Friend in Need

Rice University students use their skills to design and build a robotic arm

These engineering students have done one of the coolest good-deeds we have ever seen. What began as an engineering assignment for a class, became much more when this group of young designers made it their mission to improve the life for one of their peers.

Dee Faught, is a 17 year old with “brittle bone disease,” a disorder which impedes his ability to do many tasks others take for granted, such as picking items up from the floor or turning on a light. Bioengineering students from Rice University’s George R. Brown School of Engineering Design have taken this problem as their personal challenge, creating a robotic arm to do many of Dee’s more difficult tasks.

The students opted to use controls familiar to many teenagers, choosing to operate the system via Playstation controller. The robotic arm provides Dee with reach, gripping and manual dexterity to allow for much more independence, a very important thing for a student entering college next year.

The arm will allow Faught, who lives with osteogenesis imperfecta, a genetic condition that makes his bones especially brittle, to perform tasks most people take for granted.

Read More : https://news.rice.edu/2013/09/23/rice-students-robot-arm-a-dee-light-for-teen/