ExoSense: Measuring Manipulation in a Wearable Manner

Abstract

Grasp and manipulation is a complex task, deceivingly simple to accomplish for humans in everyday life, yet challenging to implement in a robotic hand. There is a trend in literature to use information obtained from studies on human grasp for the design and control of robotic manipulators. However, the effectiveness of such approach is dependent on the measurement tools that are available for use with human hands. While there are many sensing solutions that are designed for this purpose, obtaining a complete set of measurements of forces during grasp interaction is still challenging. In this work we aim to bridge this gap by introducing ExoSense, a passive hand exoskeleton. This device can provide position and orientation of the fingertips and, when integrated with the fingertip wearable force/torque sensing system ThimbleSense, a complete characterization of manipulation in terms of generalized forces and position of contacts on each fingertip in a completely wearable and unconstrained manner. After validating the device in terms of end-effector posture measurements and overall accuracy of grasp measurements, we report on a preliminary experiment aiming to show the potentialities of the system to study human internal grasp force variations and for neuroscientific investigation in general.This work was partially supported by the European Community funded projects SOFTPRO and SOMA (contracts 688857 and 645599, respectively), by the ERC Advanced Grant no. 291166 SoftHands.

An Adaptive Hand exoskeleton for Teleoperation System

“…The acquisition of finger motion by the exoskeleton relied on a complex kinematic model, which reduced the accuracy of motion capture. The University of Pisa developed a hand exoskeleton ExoSense [9] for tracking human hand operations. Each finger exoskeleton integrated a sensor to obtain the position of the contact object.…”