Testing

This work demonstrates elastomeric foams as a new material platform for designing soft robot gripper. These foams provide the unique capability to produce truly 3D actuating structures. The soft robot is actuated by compressed air coming from the air tank running through the miniature diaphragm pneumatic pump and electro-pneumatic solenoid valves. The electro-pneumatic solenoid valves are controlled by the MOSFET driver module via Arduino board using USB serial communication. Experimental results are showed in below sub topics and final demonstration videos.

 

Soft Robot Fingers

This work demonstrates elastomeric foams as a new material platform for designing soft robot gripper. These foams provide the unique capability to produce truly 3D actuating structures. The soft robot is actuated by compressed air coming from the air tank running through the miniature diaphragm pneumatic pump and electro-pneumatic solenoid valves. The electro-pneumatic solenoid valves are controlled by the MOSFET driver module via Arduino board using USB serial communication. Experimental results are showed in below sub topics and final demonstration videos.

 

Soft Robot Fingers controlling with LMC

The Cartesian coordinates of Index, Middle, Thumb fingers and Wrist were tracked, which are X , Y , and Z values and then by Vector addition method the wrist to fingertip parameter was obtained, which is (K), the K value ranged from minimum value of 50 (calibrated digital value of Arduino) to maximum value of 150 (calibrated digital value of Arduino).

The changing coordinates of the moving human hand, is precisely tracked and monitored by the Leap Motion Controller and the movement is displayed on the adjoining screen. The soft robot arm recreates the same movement, done by the human hand, using it's fingers based on elastromers as demonstrated in the next section.

 

Final Demonstration (Video) , Conclusion & Further Implementation

Summary

The Hand Gesture Controlled Soft Robot was designed as a bilateral system, integrated together through a central communication system. The process consists of an input feed from the master side to where as in response, the slave side recreates the initial movement of the master side. The master side of this design is the Hand Gesture Controlling Mechanism, where the hand gesture is tracked and monitored with high precision and accuracy. High accuracy has been assured through tracking the position, orientation, velocity of the finger tips as well as the positioning of the wrist, through the use of a Leap Motion Controller. Consequently, a dynamic variable will change accordingly, to the algorithm we have developed using the Processing IDE. The slave side of this integrated design is the Robot Manipulator Mechanism, with the Soft Gripper. The output of the process will be performed by this section, which is connected to the Soft gripping mechanism, where the gripping mechanism will be controlled with comparison to the flex sensor feed to replicate the initial hand gesture.

Conclusion & Further Implementations

We have tested Elastromer based fingers with different pressure settings. One major problem that we have identified is connection made for cavity section to base section is not capable enough to smoothly bend the finger and bare high pressures. Therefore some tested fingers were blown up and damaged. Also in our control board we were unable to develop a pressure relief valves to enhance the safety and also could be use to control the damaging of Soft fingers. Other than that when we are running all systems together the fingertip and wrist visualization in Processing development seems to be get stuck and delayed.  One of the possible solution for this problem is introducing stand alone control platform such as Raspberry Pi or Intel Galileo for this system which will be able to work without accessing in to a PC and properly synchronizing Master & Slave sides of the two systems.  

Also one of the major further implementation of this project is IoT (Internet of Things) enabling in this system. With such a development this product will be commercially ready. Also we can implement this Gesture Controlling with different types of Soft Robot manipulators which will be open doorways to many new applications in medical, military and agricultural industries.  

Final Test