Design and development of a functional test platform for a hand prosthesis control board

Mia hand is a robotic anthropomorphic sensorized end-effector developed by Prensilia s.r.l., a spin-off company of the bio-robotic institute of Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna. It is the result of an intense design process which has brought the device to be at the forefront of prosthetic and industrial sectors. Its simplicity and high functionality are making this device suitable for commercialization and its manufacturing process is thus currently under optimization. In this respect, this work of thesis proposes a solution to automate the test procedure of the main control board of Mia hand, which is currently long and laborious due to the board high complexity and small dimensions. After a careful analysis of the components of the Mia Hand control board and an in-depth study of the state of the art on the various PCB test procedures, a functional test has been selected as the most appropriate for this application. This has been implemented through the development of an Automatic Test Equipment (ATE) consisting of a PCB and its related firmware and a test fixture which allows to perform measurements using spring-loaded test leads. Several test routines were implemented on the ATE, which allow to verify all the functionalities of the control board and identify eventual faults present in the board due to the manufacturing process. Moreover, the results of these tests can be visualized and saved through the usage of a custom-built desktop application or a non-volatile memory card available in the test board. This helps the operator to identify eventual hardware defects already at the factory floor and thus be able to solve problems at their source.