The goal of the proposal is to create a self-reconfiguring “second skin” orthotic sleeve, with embedded robotic agents capable of sensing, actuation, and computation. In a healthy individual, mobility emerges developmentally from the re-organization of neuro-mechanical networks as each leg explores environmental force fields (e.g., due to gravity, surface contact, etc.). Worn as a conforming sleeve on a limb, the second skin robotic agents use their own sensing and computation to provide assistive actuation that enriches this exploratory process when the biological system is injured, or fails, as in brain injury. This proposal develops a first-generation sensing, but unactuated, second skin worn by two groups of infants learning to kick: one with perinatal brain injury due to prematurity, and one born at term and developing typically. Our proposed research has three goals:
(1) we will microfabricate sheets of programmable material into an orthotic sleeve,
(2) we will use a prototype second skin orthotic sleeve to collect longitudinal data on kicking by typically developing and brain injured infants, without providing any assistive actuation, and
(3) we will use the recorded infant kicking data to determine how simulated robotic agents may self-organize into patterns of collective actuation to modify the exploratory process of brain-injured infants so that it is more similar to that of their typically developing peers.
