4-Fingered Robot Can Replace Flashlight Batteries [Video]

By Larry Greenemeier

Scientific American Blogs
August 19, 2012

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2012/08/19/four-fingered-robot-can-replace-flashlight-batteries-video/

A robot that can reproduce the dexterity of the human hand
remains a dream of the bioengineering profession. One new
approach to achieving this goal avoids trying to replicate
the intricacy of the bones, joints and ligaments that
produce our most basic gestures.

A Sandia National Laboratories research team has adopted
just such a strategy by designing a modular, plastic proto-
hand whose electronics system is largely made from parts
found in cell phones. The Sandia Hand can still perform with
a high level of finesse for a robot, and is even capable of
replacing the batteries in a small flashlight. It is
expected to cost about $10,000, a fraction of the $250,000
price tag for a state-of-the- art robot hand today.

The researchers were able to scrimp in a number of clever
ways. "One was scouring the globe for the least expensive,
highest-performing components like motors, gears, etcetera,"
says Curt Salisbury, the project's principal investigator.
"Another was to build the entire electronics system from
commodity parts, especially those found in cell phones. We
also moved from metal structural elements to plastic, being
careful to design the structures so plastic would provide
adequate strength."

The Sandia Hand's fingers are modular and affixed to the
hand frame via magnets. This gives the researchers the
flexibility to design interchangeable appendages tipped with
screwdrivers, flashlights, cameras and other tools. The
fingers are also designed to detach automatically to avoid
damage if the hand hits a wall or other solid object too
hard. The researchers say the hand can even be manipulated
to retrieve and reattach a fallen finger.

Replaceable Fingers

The Hand's current incarnation has only four fingers,
including the equivalent of an opposable thumb. "It turns
out that for a wide range of manipulation tasks that humans
do, four fingers is enough," Salisbury says. Still, future
iterations of the Hand could have any number of fingers and
any arrangement of those fingers without adding much cost or
complexity, he adds.

Sandia Hand Control Glove

Although the Hand might someday be programmed to operate
autonomously, for now a human controls the device using
either a sensor-laden glove or a basic control panel. The
glove is a custom design that reads a person's hand posture
and attempts to replicate that with the robot hand,
Salisbury says. The communication protocol right now is a
USB cable, but could be upgraded to include any wireless
communications approach, he adds. The team's goal is to
develop a glove that costs about $1,000.

At such a low cost, and with the Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency (DARPA) funding the project, the Hand might
be a welcome addition to mobile robots involved in disarming
and disposing of improvised explosive devices (IEDs). The
U.S. military has deployed thousands of unmanned ground
robots worth hundreds of millions of dollars to disarm IEDs
used against troops in Afghanistan and Iraq over the past
decade. Many of these devices, such as iRobot's PackBot, are
driven by remote control into dangerous areas where they use
clamp-like metal claws to search for and dispose of bombs. A
significant amount of the money spent on these battle bots
goes toward spare parts to replace those damaged in the
field. One of Sandia's goals is to offer greater proficiency
at disarming (rather than detonating) bombs.

Sandia researchers are experimenting with upgrades to the
Hand, including a palm with two embedded cameras that convey
stereo images to a human operator during a grasping
sequence. "After that," Salisbury says, "we hope this
technology will move to field tests."

In the video below, the Sandia Hand demonstrates a number of
capabilities, including lifting a suitcase, picking up a
telephone handset and, perhaps most impressively, dropping a
AA battery into a flashlight.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDFBbCmlKHg#t=0s

Images and video courtesy of SandiaLabs.

[Larry Greenemeier is the associate editor of technology for
Scientific American, covering a variety of tech-related
topics, including biotech, computers, military tech,
nanotech and robots. Follow on Twitter @[log in to unmask]]

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