Inter-finger coordination in robot hands via mechanical implementation of principal components analysis

Postural synergies describe characteristic patterns of actuation in human hands arising from biomechanical constraints, physical tendon coupling, and neurological control schemes. Often, a small number of synergies contain much of the information required to describe an entire human hand posture, with 80% or more of the total information encoded in only two component values. Synergies have commonly been used to identify hand shapes with minimal processing power. However, they can also be used to recreate postures in robot hands, by allowing a mechanical implementation of inter-finger coordination. This can provide benefits of reduced cost, compact size, and decreased actuator count. In this paper, a novel mechanism is proposed to drive a dexterous, versatile, 17 degree-of-freedom robot hand using only two DC motors. Posture data was collected with a dataglove, and analyzed using principal components analysis to determine the postural synergies. The synergies are then mechanically hardwired into the driving mechanism, resulting in a concept dubbed eigenpostures.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Mechanical Engineering.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2007

Author dc:creator

• Brown, Christopher Yeates

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• H. Harry Asada.

• Mechanical Engineering.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/39873

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/39873