Kinova Creating Robot Arms That Improve Lives
From: IEEE Spectrum - 02/26/2013
By: Francois Boucher

When he was a child, Kinova's co-founder and CEO Charles Deguire used to
spend his summer vacations with his family in the beautiful region of
Gaspesie in Quebec, Canada. Among the family members were three uncles who
lived with muscular dystrophy. This muscle disease, which weakens the
musculoskeletal system, caused Charles' uncles to live confined in power
wheelchairs controlled only with the small residual movements left in their
fingers. Charles learned at a young age all the challenges that people in
wheelchairs face on a daily basis. 

One of these uncles, Jacques Forest, nicknamed Jaco, was an inventor. Jaco
was constantly having new ideas. In the 1980s, he decided to build a
mechanical arm to help him accomplish daily tasks. Using windshield wiper
motors, bicycle wires, Luxo lamp parts, and a hot-dog claw as a gripper, he
was able to build an arm that let him drink a glass of water by himself.
Certainly the design wasn't the most elegant and the control was quite
rudimentary, but Jaco showed how technology could significantly improve the
quality of life of upper-body disabled persons. 

Two decades later, while Charles was studying electrical engineering at
l’École de Technologie Supérieure, his mother asked if he ever thought of
continuing his uncle’s project. Not long after, Charles asked his long-time
friend and university colleague Louis-Joseph Caron-L'Écuyer (now Kinova's
CTO) to start this adventure with him. The goal: creating the best assistive
robot for upper-body disabled people. 

Thus was born Kinova and its first creation, the robotic arm Jaco, names
after Charles' now-deceased uncle. 

Read the entire article and view a video (3:12) at:
http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/robotics-hardware/startup-spotlight-kinova/

Links:
Kinova
http://kinovarobotics.com/

Jaco Research Edition
http://kinovarobotics.com/products/jaco-research-edition/

Jaco for shaving, really?
http://kinovarobotics.com/jaco-for-shaving-really/

Jaco is continuously improving to help users feed themselves…
http://kinovarobotics.com/jaco-is-continuously-improving-to-help-users-feed-themselves/

Related:
Japanese MH-2 Shoulder Robot Wants To Be Your Friend, Literally
http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/humanoids/japanese-mh2-shoulder-robot-wants-to-be-your-friend-literally