Revolutionizing Prosthetics software technology

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency Revolutionizing Prosthetics 2009 program has the goal of developing a neurally-integrated upper limb prosthesis to provide amputee soldiers with pre-injury levels of function. A team of over 30 collaborating institutions from industry and academia set out to design and construct a prosthetic limb that achieves natural human limb performance by combining the state of the art in neuroscience, robotics, sensors, power systems, actuation, and complex embedded software. The Modular Prosthetic Limb (MPL) is the result of Phase II of the program which successfully demonstrated robotic limb operation in December 2009. MPL design and development addressed several areas of technical complexity such as space, power, and mass constraints, safety-critical operation, and modularity for patient customizations based on the location of disarticulation. This paper provides an overview of the MPL system architecture, the robotic arm control strategy, and detailed information on the embedded system software that integrates the MPL components to enable patient-based control.