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Recent PhD joins rehab robotics spinoff

Eric Faulring didn't have far to travel to find a job after earning his PhD from McCormick in 2005. He found it just a few miles from the Northwestern campus at a spinoff company founded by Northwestern professors called Chicago PT LLC.

At McCormick, Faulring created and studied a haptic cobot, a device that provides a high-quality physical interface with either a virtual environment or a telerobotic slave robot. His cobot provides users with a full six-dimensional haptic experience and is capable of producing forces and motions on three translational axes and three rotational axes. By many measures its performance as a haptic interface is the best in the world. Faulring won the Best Student Paper award at the 2004 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation for his work.

Chicago PT was founded by Ed Colgate, professor of mechanical engineering and Alumnae of Northwestern Teaching Professor, and Michael Peshkin, professor of mechanical engineering, together with a colleague from Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine. At Chicago PT, Faulring is building another cobot, this one small enough to fit in a forearm. . It is a key part of a many-jointed prosthetic arm that is to be controlled in its motions by the wearer's nervous system, like a natural limb. Faulring’s miniaturized cobot acts as a continuously variable transmission with 15 independent mechanical outputs, all powered by a single motor. Each output runs a single wrist or finger joint. The cobot distributes mechanical power to the joints more efficiently and with better control than a device with multiple motors could. The research is a part of the Revolutionizing Prosthetics project, funded by DARPA.