A Single-Actuated and Cable-Driven Assistive Glove Designed For Farming Application

Hand impairments have a significant impact on quality of life and career performance. This effect is specially bold in the agricultural community, since farming activities involve continuously carrying and lifting heavy objects. Assistive robotic technologies hold considerable promise in alleviating such impairment issues. However, no portable assistive device is developed for farming applications, which requires additional considerations to ensure functionality of the device and its practicality in agricultural settings. In this work, a bi-layered structure for a robotic glove is presented, which consists of a passive extension and an active flexion layers. The former is responsible for extending the fingers, using a set of elastic bands. The flexion layer, which helps with flexing the fingers and grasping of objects, is a lightweight, self-contained, portable, cable-driven, and single-actuated robotic glove. The cable configuration is inspired from the human hand flexor tendons. Due to uncertainties associated with the fabric's flexibility and potential slippage between the cable and the glove, the designed mechanisms and sensory and control systems are initially implemented on a robotic hand. The rigid structure of the robotic hand provides a suitable proving ground for the design and control ideas. The novel power transmission system design enables the active layer to perform adaptive grasp of objects with unknown shapes, sizes, and material textures. The sensory system includes a bend sensor to detect the wearer's intention to perform grasp or release actions. Additionally, a PVDF-based sensor is developed for slip-detection, which is used as feedback to prevent further slipping of the grasped objects. Overall, the active flexion layer weighs 265 gr and can provide the maximum grasping force of 122 N, which is a noticeable improvement in comparison to the literature.

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctor of Philosophy

Level thesis:degree_level

doctoral

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Mechanical Engineering

Department dc:contributor.department

Mechanical Engineering

Grantor dc:publisher

Virginia Tech

Year dc:date.issued

2022

Author dc:creator

• Nikafrooz, Negin

Chair dc:contributor.committeechair

• Leonessa, Alexander

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• Asbeck, Alan T.
• Srinivasan, Divya
• Akbari Hamed, Kaveh

• Assistive Glove
• Robotic Hand
• Grasp Control
• Slip Detection Sensor

Statement dc:rights

• In Copyright

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

Language dc:language.iso

en

Dc Identifier Other

vt_gsexam:34099

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/109359