SKALA

Stair-climbing Kinetic Augmented Levitating Assistor

Project Status: Completed

Paraplegia is a lower extremity paralysis and more often it is caused by brain or spinal cord injuries. About 500,000 people suffer a spinal cord injury every year due to accidents, falls, sports injuries, etc.
So, as a product for the inter-collegiate hardware modelling competition we came up with SKALA – a semi-autonomous rehabilitation and locomotion assisting robot.

SKALA is basically a heavy-duty hybrid wheelchair with intelligent features. It can ascend or descend stairs, help the paraplegic with posture change and can also work as a normal wheelchair for ground locomotion. It sports features like EEG signal based and voice-based teleoperation as well as computer vision-based object tracking and navigation.

As a member of the mechanical team I worked on the design of the overall chassis, selection of motors and actuators as well as looked over the fabrication process.

The work has been published in the 4th International Conference on Mechatronics and Robotics Engineering, 2018. For more details on the design here is the link to the paper:

Design, Analysis & Prototyping of a Semi-Automated Staircase-Climbing Rehabilitation Robot

Here is a video explaining SKALA’s features.