Research Projects

This project involved the building and controlling of a dexterous robotic arm while also investigating the grasping capabilites. Printed entirely from plastic (Gael Langvin, inmoov.fr), each arm has ten degrees of freedom inclduing five for each of the fingers which are all actuated by servo motors and controlled through an Arduino MEGA 2560 board. Using motion tracking camera (Optitrack), a coordinate frame was created for the robot and the arm sent a taret position to which it moved using inverse-kinematics, the pseudo-inverse of the robot jacobian was used to find the different joint angles required for the robot hand to meet the target.

Studying the robot's hand, the grasping capibilities were compared to that of a human with a taxonomy of the robot's grasps created. Using FSR force sensors placed on the finertips a force feedback control system was built for the robot to grasp different objects while applying varying amounts of force and the strength of the fingers determined.