Third-party Evaluation of Robotic Hand Designs Using a Mechanical Glove
This provides a novel evaluation method for robotic hand designers, though it is incremental as it builds on existing hardware testing approaches.
The paper tackled the problem of evaluating robotic hand designs for dexterity by developing a mechanical glove to test hardware properties and degrees-of-freedom, finding that human participants showed improved performance in fine motor skills under three-DOF conditions compared to one-DOF.
A robotic hand design suitable for dexterity should be examined using functional tests. To achieve this, we designed a mechanical glove, which is a rigid wearable glove that enables us to develop the corresponding isomorphic robotic hand and evaluate its hardware properties. Subsequently, the effectiveness of multiple degrees-of-freedom (DOFs) was evaluated by human participants. Several fine motor skills were evaluated using the mechanical glove under two conditions: one- and three-DOF conditions. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first extensive evaluation method for robotic hand designs suitable for dexterity. (This paper was peer-reviewed and is the full translation from the Journal of the Robotics Society of Japan, Vol.39, No.6, pp.557-560, 2021.)