Have you ever looked at your hands and been amazed at how complex they are? In fact, the human hand has 27 bones, 24 degrees of freedom and 1300 nerve endings per square inch. It doesn’t take much to realize that trying to build a functional hand would be extremely difficult, yet people are trying to do it anyway. Why? Well, there are many different applications for robots with hands but the simple answer is this; we want robots to help us and to do that they need to be able to do what we do. Since much of what we do involves using our hands, it would be helpful for robots to have hands.
This article from wired.com gives some information on a number of different robot hands.
Research on robot hands has been going on for about 50 years and there are many examples of different robot hands using all kinds of different actuators (what makes it move), sensors, control systems and building materials. The first working robot hand was developed in 1960 by General Electric’s Ralph Mosher and had two fingers and 5 joints. However, it did not have any sensing capabilities.
A good example of a more modern hand is the Shadow Dexterous Air Muscle hand (#12 in the article). This hand has 24 degrees of freedom which is the same as a human hand. It uses 40 “Air Muscles” which require compressed air and electrical current to operate. The hand uses pressure sensors with a twelve bit resolution from 0-4 bars, which make it sensitive enough it to detect a quarter lying on the floor.
If you want more information the check our these pages: Spec Sheet and Shadow's website.
These examples barely scratch the surface of information about robot hand technology so hopefully I’ll have more posts on this topic in the future.
A nice post, Schuyler--thanks for embedding vids (though they seem to be cutting off text--you may need to edit your posts to add in extra spaces so that everything can be seen).
ReplyDeleteI also like the conversational tone you begin with and encourage you to continue to develop this.
One thought--you have embedded an article and vids, and unless someone is really, really compelled by your topic, they won't spend the time to watch/read all of them. So you have to really sell whatever you're embedding, and then provide a brief discussion summarizing and analyzing it. In other words, make us want to see what you see.
Not science related, but your post reminded me of this haha:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.theonion.com/video/apple-fans-chopping-off-hands-in-anticipation-of-n,19084/