Emre Akyürek
Start date: September 2011
Email: emre.akyurek@brunel.ac.uk
Supervisor: Dr Tatiana Kalganova
PhD Research Title: Remote-Controlled Ambidextrous Robot Hand Driven by Air Muscles
The aim of the project is to design an ambidextrous robotic hand, controllable through internet, able to reproduce a human gesture filmed by a webcam.
The interest of an ambidextrous design is to have fingers able to curve in one way or another, to include both a left and a right hand in a single structure. Therefore it permits significant reduction in the implementation resources for a number of applications.
The hand will be driven by pneumatic muscles. As their state of inflation represents a non-linear system, this technology is only used for a very few dexterous hands. They are most often controlled by motors, which allow controlling the systems with a nanometer resolution. However, the rubber texture of pneumatic muscles permits to add some flexibility to the overall behavior of the system.
Current researches about robotic hands are sometimes used for extreme environments dangerous for human beings, like aerospace or nuclear, but they are notably used for biomedical applications. These applications include for example animations of paralysed limbs, the structure of prosthesis, exercising for the aged, on-line physiotherapy architectures for at-home patient treatments or the relief of phantom pains. These three last points are currently the main targets of the project.
As the material needed to control the hand is very bulky, the idea is to let the hand in a laboratory and allow the patients to access it easily from a social media on internet. This implicates both a remote-control system and an embedded webcam to provide vision on the robot.
To make the robot’s control even more intuitive for the customer, the final step consists in developing a gesture recognition application. Using a second webcam, the human behavior would be replicated on the robotic model, as a hand of the same side or on the opposite one, to allow mirroring movements.
Global pattern of the project
