A Soft Humanoid Hand with In-Finger Visual Perception
This addresses robotic manipulation by integrating vision directly into soft hands for improved dexterity and perception, representing an incremental advance in hardware-software co-design.
The researchers developed a soft humanoid hand with cameras in the fingertips, achieving a grasp force of 31.8 N, durability over 15,000 cycles, and visual object segmentation accuracy above 90%.
We present a novel underactued humanoid five finger soft hand, the KIT \softhand, which is equipped with cameras in the fingertips and integrates a high performance embedded system for visual processing and control. We describe the actuation mechanism of the hand and the tendon-driven soft finger design with internally routed high-bandwidth flat-flex cables. For efficient on-board parallel processing of visual data from the cameras in each fingertip, we present a hybrid embedded architecture consisting of a field programmable logic array (FPGA) and a microcontroller that allows the realization of visual object segmentation based on convolutional neural networks. We evaluate the hand design by conducting durability experiments with one finger and quantify the grasp performance in terms of grasping force, speed and grasp success. The results show that the hand exhibits a grasp force of 31.8 N and a mechanical durability of the finger of more than 15.000 closing cycles. Finally, we evaluate the accuracy of visual object segmentation during the different phases of the grasping process using five different objects. Hereby, an accuracy above 90 % can be achieved.