The Human Hand and the Robotic Hand

Keyword(s):  
Author(s):  
Abhay Patil

Abstract: There are roughly 21 million handicapped people in India, which is comparable to 2.2% of the complete populace. These people are affected by various neuromuscular problems. To empower them to articulate their thoughts, one can supply them with elective and augmentative correspondence. For this, a Brain-Computer Interface framework (BCI) has been assembled to manage this specific need. The basic assumption of the venture reports the plan, working just as a testing impersonation of a man's arm which is intended to be powerfully just as kinematically exact. The conveyed gadget attempts to take after the movement of the human hand by investigating the signs delivered by cerebrum waves. The cerebrum waves are really detected by sensors in the Neurosky headset and produce alpha, beta, and gamma signals. Then, at that point, this sign is examined by the microcontroller and is then acquired onto the engineered hand by means of servo engines. A patient that experiences an amputee underneath the elbow can acquire from this specific biomechanical arm. Keywords: Brainwaves, Brain Computer Interface, Arduino, EEG sensor, Neurosky Mindwave Headset, Robotic arm


2017 ◽  
Vol 139 (10) ◽  
Author(s):  
Taylor D. Niehues ◽  
Ashish D. Deshpande

The anatomically correct testbed (ACT) hand mechanically simulates the musculoskeletal structure of the fingers and thumb of the human hand. In this work, we analyze the muscle moment arms (MAs) and thumb-tip force vectors in the ACT thumb in order to compare the ACT thumb's mechanical structure to the human thumb. Motion data are used to determine joint angle-dependent MA models, and thumb-tip three-dimensional (3D) force vectors are experimentally analyzed when forces are applied to individual muscles. Results are presented for both a nominal ACT thumb model designed to match human MAs and an adjusted model that more closely replicates human-like thumb-tip forces. The results confirm that the ACT thumb is capable of faithfully representing human musculoskeletal structure and muscle functionality. Using the ACT hand as a physical simulation platform allows us to gain a better understanding of the underlying biomechanical and neuromuscular properties of the human hand to ultimately inform the design and control of robotic and prosthetic hands.


Author(s):  
Thomas E. Pillsbury ◽  
Ryan M. Robinson ◽  
Norman M. Wereley

Pneumatic artificial muscles (PAMs) are used in robotics applications for their light-weight design and superior static performance. Additional PAM benefits are high specific work, high force density, simple design, and long fatigue life. Previous use of PAMs in robotics research has focused on using “large,” full-scale PAMs as actuators. Large PAMs work well for applications with large working volumes that require high force and torque outputs, such as robotic arms. However, in the case of a compact robotic hand, a large number of degrees of freedom are required. A human hand has 35 muscles, so for similar functionality, a robot hand needs a similar number of actuators that must fit in a small volume. Therefore, using full scale PAMs to actuate a robot hand requires a large volume which for robotics and prosthetics applications is not feasible, and smaller actuators, such as miniature PAMs, must be used. In order to develop a miniature PAM capable of producing the forces and contractions needed in a robotic hand, different braid and bladder material combinations were characterized to determine the load stroke profiles. Through this characterization, miniature PAMs were shown to have comparably high force density with the benefit of reduced actuator volume when compared to full scale PAMs. Testing also showed that braid-bladder interactions have an important effect at this scale, which cannot be modeled sufficiently using existing methods without resorting to a higher-order constitutive relationship. Due to the model inaccuracies and the limited selection of commercially available materials at this scale, custom molded bladders were created. PAMs created with these thin, soft bladders exhibited greatly improved performance.


Symmetry ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (9) ◽  
pp. 1470 ◽  
Author(s):  
Flaviu Ionuț Birouaș ◽  
Radu Cătălin Țarcă ◽  
Simona Dzitac ◽  
Ioan Dzitac

Robotic exoskeletons are a trending topic in both robotics and rehabilitation therapy. The research presented in this paper is a summary of robotic exoskeleton development and testing for a human hand, having application in motor rehabilitation treatment. The mechanical design of the robotic hand exoskeleton implements a novel asymmetric underactuated system and takes into consideration a number of advantages and disadvantages that arose in the literature in previous mechanical design, regarding hand exoskeleton design and also aspects related to the symmetric and asymmetric geometry and behavior of the biological hand. The technology used for the manufacturing and prototyping of the mechanical design is 3D printing. A comprehensive study of the exoskeleton has been done with and without the wearer’s hand in the exoskeleton, where multiple feedback sources are used to determine symmetric and asymmetric behaviors related to torque, position, trajectory, and laws of motion. Observations collected during the experimental testing proved to be valuable information in the field of augmenting the human body with robotic devices.


2017 ◽  
Vol 117 (5) ◽  
pp. 2025-2036 ◽  
Author(s):  
Abdeldjallil Naceri ◽  
Alessandro Moscatelli ◽  
Robert Haschke ◽  
Helge Ritter ◽  
Marco Santello ◽  
...  

Because of the complex anatomy of the human hand, in the absence of external constraints, a large number of postures and force combinations can be used to attain a stable grasp. Motor synergies provide a viable strategy to solve this problem of motor redundancy. In this study, we exploited the technical advantages of an innovative sensorized object to study unconstrained hand grasping within the theoretical framework of motor synergies. Participants were required to grasp, lift, and hold the sensorized object. During the holding phase, we repetitively applied external disturbance forces and torques and recorded the spatiotemporal distribution of grip forces produced by each digit. We found that the time to reach the maximum grip force during each perturbation was roughly equal across fingers, consistent with a synchronous, synergistic stiffening across digits. We further evaluated this hypothesis by comparing the force distribution of human grasping vs. robotic grasping, where the control strategy was set by the experimenter. We controlled the global hand stiffness of the robotic hand and found that this control algorithm produced a force pattern qualitatively similar to human grasping performance. Our results suggest that the nervous system uses a default whole hand synergistic control to maintain a stable grasp regardless of the number of digits involved in the task, their position on the objects, and the type and frequency of external perturbations. NEW & NOTEWORTHY We studied hand grasping using a sensorized object allowing unconstrained finger placement. During object perturbation, the time to reach the peak force was roughly equal across fingers, consistently with a synergistic stiffening across fingers. Force distribution of a robotic grasping hand, where the control algorithm is based on global hand stiffness, was qualitatively similar to human grasping. This suggests that the central nervous system uses a default whole hand synergistic control to maintain a stable grasp.


2014 ◽  
Vol 11 (03) ◽  
pp. 1450019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maxime Chalon ◽  
Alexander Dietrich ◽  
Markus Grebenstein

The impressive manipulation capabilities of the human hand are undoubtedly related to the thumb opposition. Such a versatility is highly desirable in the context of humanoid robots, in particular when performing object manipulation. In the present case, a robotic hand with size, forces, velocity, and shape comparable to the human one, is envisioned. Unlike most robotic designs — where the fingers are modular and the thumb is simply a finger placed in opposition — the thumb benefits from an intensive functional analysis. This paper details the design method of the thumb of the Awiwi hand, the hand of the Integrated Hand Arm System project of DLR. First, several guidelines are presented that are fused and, with the help of a novel optimization method, lead to the final design. Finally, the design is evaluated by the means of biomedical tests on the realized hardware.


1993 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 203-220 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert N. Rohling ◽  
John M. Hollerbach ◽  
Stephen C. Jacobsen

An optimized fingertip mapping (OFM) algorithm has been developed to transform human hand poses into robot hand poses. It has been implemented to teleoperate the Utah/MIT Dextrous Hand by a new hand master: the Utah Dextrous Hand Master. The keystone of the algorithm is the mapping of both the human fingertip positions and orientations to the robot fingers. Robot hand poses are generated by minimizing the errors between desired human fingertip positions and orientations and possible robot fingertip positions and orientations. Differences in the fingertip workspaces that arise from kinematic dissimilarities between the human and robot hands are accounted for by the use of a priority based mapping strategy. The OFM gives first priority to the human fingertip position goals and the second to orientation.


2014 ◽  
Vol 136 (9) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lei Cui ◽  
Ugo Cupcic ◽  
Jian S. Dai

The complex kinematic structure of a human thumb makes it difficult to capture and control the thumb motions. A further complication is that mapping the fingertip position alone leads to inadequate grasping postures for current robotic hands, many of which are equipped with tactile sensors on the volar side of the fingers. This paper aimed to use a data glove as the input device to teleoperate the thumb of a humanoid robotic hand. An experiment protocol was developed with only minimum hardware involved to compensate for the differences in kinematic structures between a robotic hand and a human hand. A nonlinear constrained-optimization formulation was proposed to map and calibrate the motion of a human thumb to that of a robotic thumb by minimizing the maximum errors (minimax algorithms) of fingertip position while subject to the constraint of the normals of the surfaces of the thumb and the index fingertips within a friction cone. The proposed approach could be extended to other teleoperation applications, where the master and slave devices differ in kinematic structure.


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