Design of a joystick with an adjustable damper to study kinematically constrained movements made by children

The aim of this work was to create an apparatus that will allow for the study of sensorimotor control development in children, specifically the interaction with a simple kinematically constrained object. A one-degree-of-freedom rotational joystick was built, sensorized with an encoder and force/torque sensor, and outfitted with a custom damper. The damper was modeled as having a stiffness, viscous friction, and Coulomb friction, and this allowed for a controlled manner by which to identify three unique damping levels. Future work will discuss the experimental setup in more detail, and will present results for how both children and adults interact with the testing apparatus. Given here is the motivation for this research direction, a brief overview of the experimental apparatus and setup, and a high-level discussion of a human subject study that will be presented in future papers.

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