Towards Complex and Continuous Manipulation: A Gesture Based Anthropomorphic Robotic Hand Design
This research aims to improve the dexterity of anthropomorphic robotic hands for daily object manipulation, which is a problem for robotics researchers and engineers.
This paper addresses the limitation of anthropomorphic robotic hands in performing complex daily object manipulations beyond grasping. It proposes a gesture-based framework using 33 grasping gestures as a foundation, leading to a robotic hand design with 13 degrees of actuation. The framework was validated on a three-level benchmark including 62 test gestures and complex continuous actions, demonstrating its dexterity.
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}.