A team of researchers from the Polytechnic University of Madrid has developed new concepts of design for integrate mechanics and electronics inside the hand of a humanoid robotwhich allows communication more friendly with humans and favors their social interaction.
ManoPla is a robotic hand whose purpose is gestural communication. It has been devised and developed by researchers from the Center for Automation and Robotics (CAR), a mixed research center of the Polytechnic University of Madrid (UPM) and the Higher Council for Scientific Research (CSIC).
Its design is inspired by a real hand, and it is lightweight. With this objective, imaginative and original solutions have been adopted in its development. ManoPla will allow guide or assistance robots to transmit, in a more natural way, the emphasis, certain feelings and emotions, thus enriching human-robot communication.
It is a functional prototype with 17 controllable joints plus four passive ones.
In social robotics, a friendly and natural interaction with the human being is particularly sought. In a conversation with another person, gestural communication can be as rich and even more eloquent than verbal. For this reason, in the last decade, there are many developments and investigations that focus on this interactive capacity of the robot.
For example, at the Higher Technical School of Engineering and Industrial Design (ETSIDI) of the UPM, a Hidalgo humanoid social robot and, for him, it was decided to design a robotic hand as close to the human hand in terms of mobility.
The impact, mobility and grip tests carried out have aroused interest in the field of social robotics, so that part of their development has been published in the journal International Journal of Social Robotics.
Each element has its function
The result of this research, carried out by researchers from the Robotics and Cybernetics group at CAR-UPM-CSIC, is a functional prototype with 17 controllable joints plus four passives.
The four finger joints are powered by three motors (modeled after the humanoid astronaut Robonaut). The thumb, due to its uniqueness, controls the four joints with which it has been modeled. In addition, the palm can warp, managing to emulate in an exceptional way the human morphology and its movements.
Given the Gauntlet is totally self containedboth for the actuation systems and for the control (it has its own microcontroller to regulate all the movements and measure and serve the information), the most relevant physical problem that has occurred is the space limitation offered by the device.
The external appearance of the hand is not decorative: each of the pieces, both the fingers and the palm, are part of some internal mechanism.
The use of mechatronic design methods that bring together the three fields covered —mechanics, electronics and programming— has made it possible to develop the final fully functional prototype. In this design everything is used. This means that the electronic board is structural, and even has integrated all possible sensors, adapting the mechanics of the fingers and sensors to make this possible. In addition, specific solutions have been developed to achieve elastic actuations with optical joint transducers of novel and specific configuration and design.
All these solutions make the hand an engineering project thorough, with its own identity, which has constantly sought alternative solutions to problems that are difficult to solve. The software design has been studied in detail to achieve absolute control in the robotic hand. Thanks to the low-level programming of the microcontroller, it has been possible to optimize the execution cycles and the processing frequencies of each of the elements have been controlled.
Nor is the outward appearance of the hand merely decorative. Each of the pieces, both the fingers and the palm, are part of some internal mechanism, so the appearance end is totally linked by the functionality.
In total, ManoPla weighs only 250 grams, integrates 17 motors and 17 sensors, and has 22 joints, with their respective power electronics and control system. The only thing that it does not integrate is a battery, since it is considered that it will always have to be supported by a robotic arm through which the necessary energy for its operation reaches it.
Rights: Creative Commons.