No Arabic abstract
This article presents a new hand architecture with three under-actuated fingers. Each finger performs spatial movements to achieve more complex and varied grasping than the existing planar-movement fingers. The purpose of this hand is to grasp complex-shaped workpieces as they leave the machining centres. Among the taxonomy of grips, cylindrical and spherical grips are often used to grasp heavy objects. A combination of these two modes makes it possible to capture most of the workpieces machined with 5-axis machines. However, the change in grasping mode requires the fingers to reconfigure themselves to perform spatial movements. This solution requires the addition of two or three actuators to change the position of the fingers and requires sensors to recognize the shape of the workpiece and determine the type of grasp to be used. This article proposes to extend the notion of under-actuated fingers to spatial movements. After a presentation of the kinematics of the fingers, the problem of stability is discussed as well as the transmission of forces in this mechanism. The complete approach for calculating the stability conditions is presented from the study of Jacobian force transmission matrices. CAD representations of the hand and its behavior in spherical and cylindrical grips are presented.
Most current anthropomorphic robotic hands can realize part of the human hand functions, particularly for object grasping. However, due to the complexity of the human hand, few current designs target at daily object manipulations, even for simple actions like rotating a pen. To tackle this problem, we introduce a gesture based framework, which adopts the widely-used 33 grasping gestures of Feix as the bases for hand design and implementation of manipulation. In the proposed framework, we first measure the motion ranges of human fingers for each gesture, and based on the results, we propose a simple yet dexterous robotic hand design with 13 degrees of actuation. Furthermore, we adopt a frame interpolation based method, in which we consider the base gestures as the key frames to represent a manipulation task, and use the simple linear interpolation strategy to accomplish the manipulation. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework, we define a three-level benchmark, which includes not only 62 test gestures from previous research, but also multiple complex and continuous actions. Experimental results on this benchmark validate the dexterity of the proposed design and our video is available in url{https://drive.google.com/file/d/1wPtkd2P0zolYSBW7_3tVMUHrZEeXLXgD/view?usp=sharing}.
Soft robotic hands and grippers are increasingly attracting attention as a robotic end-effector. Compared with rigid counterparts, they are safer for human-robot and environment-robot interactions, easier to control, lower cost and weight, and more compliant. Current soft robotic hands have mostly focused on the soft fingers and bending actuators. However, the palm is also essential part for grasping. In this work, we propose a novel design of soft humanoid hand with pneumatic soft fingers and soft palm. The hand is inexpensive to fabricate. The configuration of the soft palm is based on modular design which can be easily applied into actuating all kinds of soft fingers before. The splaying of the fingers, bending of the whole palm, abduction and adduction of the thumb are implemented by the soft palm. Moreover, we present a new design of soft finger, called hybrid bending soft finger (HBSF). It can both bend in the grasping axis and deflect in the side-to-side axis as human-like motion. The functions of the HBSF and soft palm were simulated by SOFA framework. And their performance was tested in experiments. The 6 fingers with 1 to 11 segments were tested and analyzed. The versatility of the soft hand is evaluated and testified by the grasping experiments in real scenario according to Feix taxonomy. And the results present the diversity of grasps and show promise for grasping a variety of objects with different shapes and weights.
A new fluid-driven soft robot hand in this study uses the idea of the bionics and has the anthropomorphic form, which is oriented to the flexible grasp function. The soft robot hand is composed of a new kind of multi-freedom soft finger and soft palm, which realizes the characteristic grasping function of forehand and backhand. Combined with the fine fluid control system, the soft hand can realize flexible grasping under high pressure, so as to realize flexible grasping operation for different types of target objects in the underwater environment. The soft robot hand was controlled based on water hydraulic platform, Finally, the soft robot hand and the fine fluid control system were connected to form the underwater soft robot hand experiment platform.
This paper presents preliminary results of the design, development, and evaluation of a hand rehabilitation glove fabricated using lobster-inspired hybrid design with rigid and soft components for actuation. Inspired by the bending abdomen of lobsters, hybrid actuators are built with serially jointed rigid shells actuated by pressurized soft chambers inside to generate bending motions. Such bio-inspiration absorbs features from the classical rigid-bodied robotics with precisely-defined motion generation, as well as the emerging soft robotics with light-weight, physically safe, and adaptive actuation. The fabrication procedure is described, followed by experiments to mechanically characterize these actuators. Finally, an open-palm glove design integrated with these hybrid actuators is presented for a qualitative case study. A hand rehabilitation system is developed by learning patterns of the sEMG signals from the users forearm to train the assistive glove for hand rehabilitation exercises.
Current anthropomorphic robotic hands mainly focus on improving their dexterity by devising new mechanical structures and actuation systems. However, most of them rely on a single structure/system (e.g., bone-only) and ignore the fact that the human hand is composed of multiple functional structures (e.g., skin, bones, muscles, and tendons). This not only increases the difficulty of the design process but also lowers the robustness and flexibility of the fabricated hand. Besides, other factors like customization, the time and cost for production, and the degree of resemblance between human hands and robotic hands, remain omitted. To tackle these problems, this study proposes a 3D printable multi-layer design that models the hand with the layers of skin, tissues, and bones. The proposed design first obtains the 3D surface model of a target hand via 3D scanning, and then generates the 3D bone models from the surface model based on a fast template matching method. To overcome the disadvantage of the rigid bone layer in deformation, the tissue layer is introduced and represented by a concentric tube based structure, of which the deformability can be explicitly controlled by a parameter. Besides, a low-cost yet effective underactuated system is adopted to drive the fabricated hand. The proposed design is tested with 33 widely used object grasping types, as well as special objects like fragile silken tofu, and outperforms previous designs remarkably. With the proposed design, anthropomorphic robotic hands can be produced fast with low cost, and be customizable and deformable.