Towards Complex and Continuous Manipulation: A Gesture Based Anthropomorphic Robotic Hand Design

Most current anthropomorphicrobotic 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 https://drive.google.com/file/d/1wPtkd2P0zolYSBW7_3tVMUHrZEeXLXgD/view?usp=sharing.

I. Introduction

Artificial hands remain one of the hardest problems in robotics [1], [2], due to the lack of comprehensive understanding on the actuation and sensory systems of the human hand. Earlier studies [3]–[5] try to fully replicate functions of the human hand via complicated mechanical structures and actuation systems. Although these robotic hands have ranges of motion (ROM) and degrees of freedom (DOF) similar to those of human hands, or even have the ability to complete astounding manipulation tasks like solving a Rubik's cube [5], they are costly to fabricate and their dexterity can still be improved.