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Physical AI for Good · Spooky Civic AI Hackathon
Assistive Eating Arm
A robot arm that listens, scoops food and brings it to someone who needs help eating.
People’s ChoiceThe problem
Some people can’t lift a spoon to their mouth, for example after a stroke or with ALS, and need another person to feed them.
What they built
A voice-controlled feeding arm on a 3D-printed SO-101, running on Viam and an NVIDIA Jetson Orin. You ask for food, it finds the right bowl, scoops a bite and brings it to your mouth.
How it works
- You ask: “Grab me some cereal.”
- It looks into each bowl and finds the food you asked for with an AI vision model.
- It scoops a bite the way the team taught it, by guiding the arm by hand.
- Its camera finds your mouth and it brings the spoon to you, stopping 3 cm from your lips.
- Say “stop” at any time and the arm stops.
The team
Kurt Lin, Sunny Li and Safal Ghimire, NYU students on the same robotics team, built it in one weekend.
Summary adapted from the team's own project write-up.
