A Lobster-inspired Robotic Glove for Hand Rehabilitation
This is an incremental improvement for patients needing hand rehabilitation, offering a bio-inspired design that merges rigid and soft robotics for safer, adaptive actuation.
The paper tackles hand rehabilitation by developing a robotic glove using lobster-inspired hybrid actuators that combine rigid and soft components for bending motions, resulting in a system that learns from sEMG signals to assist in exercises.
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 user's forearm to train the assistive glove for hand rehabilitation exercises.