© RBO
Robotics and Biology Laboratory
Improving In-Hand Manipulation Skills With Constraints Provided by a Second Thumb
Motivation
The thumb can be considered the most important finger of the human hand for handling objects. Compared to the other fingers, the thumb has much greater range of motion. This allows the thumb to flexibly place contacts and exert a variety of forces on an object held in the hand. The thumb design of the latest RBO Hand 3 (RH3) allows our hand to behave more skillfully than prior versions. In this work, you will investitage a two-thumb design of the RH3 (Puhlmann et al.), with the goal of being able to flexibly provide contacts to improve manipulation capabilities in the hand.
Description of Work
- Literature research on different thumb mechanisms and two-thumb designs
- Parameterize a chosen two-thumb-design
- Investigating different kinematic measures that will serve as an objective function to optimize the tw-thumb mechanism
- Realize the optimized thumb design via 3D printing and evaluate the optimized hand on real-world manipulation tasks
