A Human-Like Robot Hand and Arm with Fluidic Muscles: Biologically Inspired Construction and Functionality

Abstract

Abstract. Humanoid robots are fascinating from two points of view, firstly their construction and secondly because they lend life to inanimate objects. The combination of biology and robots leads to smoother and compliant movement which is more pleasant for us as people. Biologically inspired robots embody non-rigid movement which are made possible by special joints or actuators which give way and can both actively and passively adapt stiffness in different situations. The following paper deals with the construction of a compliant embodiment of a humanoid robot arm, including a five-finger hand with artificial fluidic muscles. The biologically inspired decentralized control architecture allows small units to be responsible for each main movement task. The first section gives a short introduction as to how bionics engineers think and tries to motivate us to build compliant machines. The second section looks at mechanical aspects, limitations and constraints and furthermore describes a human-like robot arm and hand. Section 3 presents the fluidic muscle actuator of the company FESTO 3 . The fourth section describes the decentralized control architecture and the electronic components. The last section concludes the paper while looking at further prospects.

Embodied Artificial Intelligence: Trends and Challenges

“…Humanoids require the development of sophisticated body parts, legs, arms, hands, etc., that can potentially be used, at least to some extent, as prosthetic devices. The fascinating research by Yokoi et al (2004) and by Boblan et al (2004) points in this direction. The ground breaking research by Potter and his co-workers (Bakkum et al, 2004) might eventually be employed for interfacing these devices smoothly with humansan additional intriguing perspective.…”

“…In order to achieve real progress, artificial muscles, tendons, and flexible joints must be developed which represents a big engineering challenge. Big strides in this direction have been made by Rudolf Bannasch and his colleagues (Boblan et al, 2004).…”

Segmented Foot with Compliant Actuators and Its Applications to Lower-Limb Prostheses and Exoskeletons

“…For example, shape memory alloys show impressive actuation characteristics, while suffer from slow response and motion constraints [40]. Other interesting compliant actuators include artificial muscle actuator using fluid [41], polymer materials [42], dielectric elastomers [43], etc. Most of them are used in particular environments and difficult to implement in autonomous systems, especially in lower-limb prostheses and exoskeletons.…”

Study on a New Dexterous Hand Actuated by Pneumatic Muscle Actuators

“…Humanoid dexterous hand is designed into an integrated structural system (hand+arm): the hand and the arm are jointly designed and cannot be conceived as separate subsystems (examples of this approach are the Utah Hand [1], the Robonaut hand [2], the Shadow Hand [3] and the ZAR hand [4]). An integrated system can distribute these actuators in the whole structure, placing them where room is available.…”