Abstract-This paper describes the design of a new hand for the robot iCub. Developed as part of the European project RobotCub the iCub is a robot baby based on an 18 month to 2.5 year old child. The current iCub hands are under-actuated which means they are not as dexterous as a true child's hand. The hand designed in this work has a total of 22 degrees of freedom of which 18 are independently drivable. In order to minimise weight and cost the hand has been produced from Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene (ABS) using 3D printing techniques. This removes the need for extensive machining which would add significantly to the overall cost of the hand. A prototype finger has been produced and tested and a full mechanical design is presented.

Modelling and simulation is a critical stage in the design and testing of complex systems, in particular humanoid robots. Our motivation to develop a new simulator is that existing tools do not provide the flexibility needed for modelling the C-Cub, the most recent open source humanoid robot with compliant joints developed at the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT). Furthermore, we are interested in a simulator where the user has the ability to customize the simulation in order to represent the actuators and sensors that are actually used. In this paper, a simulator based on Robotran, a symbolic multibody modelling software tool, and Matlab is described. The approach presented in the paper has been used to develop and test control systems for the C-Cub and an earlier version (iCub).

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Physical movement impairments caused by central nervous system dysfunction or by muscle spasms generated from other neurological damage or dysfunction can often make it difficult or impossible for affected individuals to interact with computer generated environments using the conventional mouse interfaces. This work investigates the use of a 2 dimensional haptic device as an assistive robotic aid to minimize the effects of the pathological absence of motor control on the upper limb in impaired users while using a mouse interface. The haptic system used in this research is a two degree of freedom (DOF) Pantograph planar device. To detect the intended user motion, the device is equipped with force sensing allowing the monitoring of the user applied loads. Impedance based techniques are used to develop a “clumsy” motion suppression control system. The erratic motion suppression techniques and the experimental system setup are evaluated in two dimensional tracking tasks using a human subject with failure of the gross coordination of the upper limb muscle movements resulting from a disorder called ‘Muscle Ataxia’. The results presented demonstrate the ability of the system to improve the tracking performance of the impaired user while interacting with a simple computer generated 2D space.