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}.
Anthropomorphic robot avatars present a conceptually novel approach to remote affective communication, allowing people across the world a wider specter of emotional and social exchanges over traditional 2D and 3D image data. However, there are several limitations of current telepresence robots, such as the high weight, complexity of the system that prevents its fast deployment, and the limited workspace of the avatars mounted on either static or wheeled mobile platforms. In this paper, we present a novel concept of telecommunication through a robot avatar based on an anthropomorphic swarm of d…
Institut de Recherche en Communications et Cybernétique de Nantes（南特通信与控制论研究所）；Aldebaran（阿尔德巴兰）；LUNAM University（卢南大学）；University of Poitiers（普瓦捷大学）
This paper presents a numerical method to conceive and design the kinematic model of an anthropomorphic robotic hand used for gesturing and grasping. In literature, there are few numerical methods for the finger placement of human-inspired robotic hands. In particular, there are no numerical methods, for the thumb placement, that aim to improve the hand dexterity and grasping capabilities by keeping the hand design close to the human one. While existing models are usually the result of successive parameter adjustments, the proposed method determines the fingers placements by mean of empirical …
ObjRetarget: An Object-Aware Motion Retargeting Framework with Anthropomorphic Arm Constraints and Polyhedral Hand Modeling
School of Artificial Intelligence, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen（香港中文大学（深圳）人工智能学院）；School of Computing, University of Portsmouth（朴茨茅斯大学计算学院）
Progressive Transfer Learning for Dexterous In-Hand Manipulation with Multi-Fingered Anthropomorphic Hand
Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学人工智能学院）；Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Hong Kong Institute of Science and Innovation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院香港创新研究院人工智能与机器人中心）
Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学人工智能学院）；CAS Center for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligence Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院脑科学与智能技术卓越创新中心）；Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Hong Kong Institute of Science and Innovation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院香港创新研究院人工智能与机器人中心）
Grasping with anthropomorphic robotic hands involves much more hand-object interactions compared to parallel-jaw grippers. Modeling hand-object interactions is essential to the study of multi-finger hand dextrous manipulation. This work presents DVGG, an efficient grasp generation network that takes single-view observation as input and predicts high-quality grasp configurations for unknown objects. In general, our generative model consists of three components: 1) Point cloud completion for the target object based on the partial observation; 2) Diverse sets of grasps generation given the comple…
Do Robots Really Need Anthropomorphic Hands? A Comparison of Human and Robotic Hands
Robotics Innovation Center, Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz GmbH (DFKI)（德意志人工智能研究中心机器人创新中心）；Leibniz Universität Hannover, L3S Research Center（汉诺威莱布尼茨大学L3S研究中心）
Advantages of Multimodal versus Verbal-Only Robot-to-Human Communication with an Anthropomorphic Robotic Mock Driver
Centre for Applied Autonomous Sensor Systems (AASS)（应用自主传感器系统中心（AASS））；Örebro University（厄勒布鲁大学）；Robert Bosch GmbH（罗伯特·博世有限公司）；University of Skövde（舍夫德大学）；TU Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）
The Role of Touch: Towards Optimal Tactile Sensing Distribution in Anthropomorphic Hands for Dexterous In-Hand Manipulation
VisLab, Institute for Systems；Soft Robotics Lab National University of Singapore, Singapore；BRAIR Lab, BioRobotics Institute Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna, Pisa, Italia
University of Bristol（布里斯托大学）；Universit di Pisa（比萨大学）；Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia（意大利理工学院）
In this work, we report on the integrated sensorimotor control of the Pisa/IIT SoftHand, an anthropomorphic soft robot hand designed around the principle of adaptive synergies, with the BRL tactile fingertip (TacTip), a soft biomimetic optical tactile sensor based on the human sense of touch. Our focus is how a sense of touch can be used to control an anthropomorphic hand with one degree of actuation, based on an integration that respects the hand's mechanical functionality. We consider: (i) closed-loop tactile control to establish a light contact on an unknown held object, based on the struct…
National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）
For robots to be accommodated in human spaces and in humans daily activities, robots should be able to understand messages from the human conversation partner. In the same light, humans must also understand the messages that are being communicated by robots, including the non-verbal ones. We conducted a web-based video study wherein participants gave interpretations on the iconic gestures and emblems that were produced by an anthropomorphic robot. Out of the 15 gestures presented, we found 6 robotic gestures that can be accurately recognized by the human observer. These were nodding, clapping,…
Handshakes are fundamental and common greeting and parting gestures among humans. They are important in shaping first impressions as people tend to associate character traits with a person's handshake. To widen the social acceptability of robots and make a lasting first impression, a good handshaking ability is an important skill for social robots. Therefore, to test the human-likeness of a robot handshake, we propose an initial Turing-like test, primarily for the hardware interface to future AI agents. We evaluate the test on an android robot's hand to determine if it can pass for a human han…
DigiArm: An Anthropomorphic 3D-Printed Prosthetic Hand with Enhanced Dexterity for Typing Tasks
Department of Computer Science, Technion, Haifa, Israel（计算机科学系，技术学院，海法，以色列）；Department of Mechanical Engineering, Technion, Haifa, Israel（机械工程系，技术学院，海法，以色列）
University of Stuttgart（斯图加特大学）；Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems（马克斯·普朗克智能系统研究所）；Technische Universität Berlin（柏林工业大学）
This paper presents a teleoperation system that includes robot perception and intent prediction from hand gestures. The perception module identifies the objects present in the robot workspace and the intent prediction module which object the user likely wants to grasp. This architecture allows the approach to rely on traded control instead of direct control: we use hand gestures to specify the goal objects for a sequential manipulation task, the robot then autonomously generates a grasping or a retrieving motion using trajectory optimization. The perception module relies on the model-based tra…
Generalized Anthropomorphic Functional Grasping with Minimal Demonstrations
School of Artificial Intelligence, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院人工智能学院）；CAS Center for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligence Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院脑科学与智能技术卓越创新中心）；Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Hong Kong Institute of Science and Innovation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院香港创新研究院人工智能与机器人中心）
LIRMM, University of Montpellier, CNRS（蒙彼利埃大学法国国家科学研究中心LIRMM实验室）；Stanford University（斯坦福大学）
The current generation of surgeons requires extensive training in teleoperation to develop specific dexterous skills, which are independent of medical knowledge. Training curricula progress from manipulation tasks to simulated surgical tasks but are limited in time. To tackle this, we propose to integrate surgical robotic training together with Haptic Feedback (HF) to improve skill acquisition. This paper present the initial but promising results of our haptic device designed to support in the training of surgical gestures. Our ongoing work is related to integrate the HF in the RAVEN II platfo…
T-800: An 800 Hz Data Glove for Precise Hand Gesture Tracking
Peking University（北京大学）；Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Peking University（北京大学人工智能研究院）；School of Integrated Circuits, Peking University（北京大学集成电路学院）；School of Psychological and Cognitive Sciences, Peking University（北京大学心理与认知科学学院）；Beijing Key Laboratory of Behavior and Mental Health, Peking University（北京大学行为与心理健康北京市重点实验室）；LeapZenith AI Research（跃升人工智能研究院）；State Key Laboratory of Robotics and Intelligent Systems, Shenyang Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院沈阳自动化研究所机器人学国家重点实验室）
We present in-hand manipulation skills on a dexterous, compliant, anthropomorphic hand. Even though these skills were derived in a simplistic manner, they exhibit surprising robustness to variations in shape, size, weight, and placement of the manipulated object. They are also very insensitive to variation of execution speeds, ranging from highly dynamic to quasi-static. The robustness of the skills leads to compositional properties that enable extended and robust manipulation programs. To explain the surprising robustness of the in-hand manipulation skills, we performed a detailed, empirical …
A Bimanual Gesture Interface for ROS-Based Mobile Manipulators Using TinyML and Sensor Fusion
†‡Department of Mechatronics Engineering, Rajshahi University of Engineering \& Technology, Kazla, Rajshahi-6204, Bangladesh §Department of Electrical \& Systems Engineering, School of Engineering \& Applied Science, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104, United States Email: , †, ‡, §
Object Classification Utilizing Neuromorphic Proprioceptive Signals in Active Exploration: Validated on a Soft Anthropomorphic Hand
Institute for Cognitive Systems, Technical University of Munich（认知系统研究所，慕尼黑技术大学）；Department of Biomedical Engineering, Johns Hopkins University（生物医学工程系，约翰霍普金斯大学）
Tactile SoftHand-A: 3D-Printed, Tactile, Highly-underactuated, Anthropomorphic Robot Hand with an Antagonistic Tendon Mechanism
School of Engineering Mathematics and Technology（工程数学与技术学院）；Bristol Robotics Laboratory（布里斯托尔机器人实验室）；University of Bristol（布里斯托尔大学）；School of Robotics（机器人学院）；Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University（西安交通大学利物浦大学）；Department of Information Engineering（信息工程系）；Research Center "E.Piaggio"（E.Piaggio研究中心）；University of Pisa（比萨大学）；Soft Robotics for Human Cooperation and Rehabilitation（人机合作与康复软机器人）；Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia（意大利技术研究院）
We present a user-friendly interface to teleoperate a soft robot manipulator in a complex environment. Key components of the system include a manipulator with a grasping end-effector that grows via tip eversion, gesture-based control, and haptic display to the operator for feedback and guidance. In the initial work, the operator uses the soft robot to build a tower of blocks, and future works will extend this to shared autonomy scenarios in which the human operator and robot intelligence are both necessary for task completion.
We present the RBO Hand 3, a highly capable and versatile anthropomorphic soft hand based on pneumatic actuation. The RBO Hand 3 is designed to enable dexterous manipulation, to facilitate transfer of insights about human dexterity, and to serve as a robust research platform for extensive real-world experiments. It achieves these design goals by combining many degrees of actuation with intrinsic compliance, replicating relevant functioning of the human hand, and by combining robust components in a modular design. The RBO Hand 3 possesses 16 independent degrees of actuation, implemented in a de…
TacGNN:Learning Tactile-based In-hand Manipulation with a Blind Robot
Southern University of Science and Technology（南方科技大学）；University of Hong Kong（香港大学）；Tencent Robotics X（腾讯 Robotics X）；University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；Imperial College London（帝国理工学院）
Prosthetic Hand Manipulation System Based on EMG and Eye Tracking Powered by the Neuromorphic Processor AltAi
Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology（斯克尔科沃科学与技术研究所）；MSU Institute for Artificial Intelligence（莫斯科大学人工智能研究所）；Lomonosov Moscow State University（罗蒙诺索夫莫斯科国立大学）
Warwick Manufacturing Group, University of Warwick（华威大学华威制造集团）；University of Warwick（华威大学）
Training agents to autonomously learn how to use anthropomorphic robotic hands has the potential to lead to systems capable of performing a multitude of complex manipulation tasks in unstructured and uncertain environments. In this work, we first introduce a suite of challenging simulated manipulation tasks that current reinforcement learning and trajectory optimisation techniques find difficult. These include environments where two simulated hands have to pass or throw objects between each other, as well as an environment where the agent must learn to spin a long pen between its fingers. We t…
