With the start of the new semester, the BLINC lab will begin working with some new trainees. We would like to welcome  Quinn, McNiel, and James to the lab. Shortly, these three new students will begin their master’s research in some of the exciting projects being performed in the BLINC lab.

Welcome to the team!

Earlier in May, members of the BLINC lab launched the BLINCdev website. What is BLINCdev you may ask…

BLINCdev is an open source community centered around robotic technologies. Discussions, forums, and open sources files featuring BLINC Lab’s bento arm. More exciting releases are on the horizon, so check out the new site and get involved!

Website:  https://blincdev.ca/

Dylan, Jaden and I (Rory) recently attended World Maker Faire New York 2015 to demonstrate our robotic platforms: The Bento Arm and HANDi Hand. For those unaware, Maker Faire is the world’s biggest show and tell. In addition to being a 2 day fusion of technology, science, crafts and arts it is also a major showcase event for new technologies especially those related to the DIY and open source maker culture. This year there were over 900 maker projects and over 95,000 attendees from 45 states and 48 countries. Here is a brief video recap of some of the highlights from our trip:

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The BLINC Lab spent an exciting afternoon demonstrating upper limb prosthetic technologies at the Telus World of Science.

It was great to see the enthusiasm of all the young scientists as we demonstrated our robotic hands, arms and 3D printing.

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Craig Sherstan was recently awarded a Vanier scholarship to continue his work as a PhD student in the BLINC lab. Craig and his work were recently featured by the Faculty of Science at the University of Alberta. You can read the article here.

The Blinc Lab has been very productive these summer months. A new onslaught of eager summer students have help us make some exciting progress on our main lines of research. We are looking forward to the data collection and analysis to follow.

It has been a year in the making, and now BLINC’s Handi-hand and Bento Arm are integrated. After a some mechanical improvements and a healthy amount of programming our multi-articulate hand and arm are talking and ready to participate in exciting upcoming experiments!

After much anticipation the Modular Prosthetic Limb has arrived at the BLINC lab!!!

MPL Fresh Out of the Box

This fully sensored, multi-articulate limb is capable of achieving movement in 26 degrees of freedom. The limb provides the BLINC Lab access to a ton of useful functionality and data. After an in depth training session with engineering personnel from HDT Robotics the limb is up and running. Our engineers are eager to start programming and playing with this incredibly advanced piece of equipment.

The Assembled MPL

A Closer Look