ExoSense: Measuring Manipulation in a Wearable Manner

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.

[1]  Alessandro Tognetti,et al.  A Multi-Modal Sensing Glove for Human Manual-Interaction Studies , 2016 .

[2]  D. Rossi,et al.  New generation of wearable goniometers for motion capture systems , 2014, Journal of NeuroEngineering and Rehabilitation.

[3]  J. P. Friconneau,et al.  ABLE, an innovative transparent exoskeleton for the upper-limb , 2008, 2008 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

[4]  Sachin Chitta,et al.  Human-Inspired Robotic Grasp Control With Tactile Sensing , 2011, IEEE Transactions on Robotics.

[5]  D. Hose,et al.  A Goniometric Glove for Clinical Hand Assessment , 2000, Journal of hand surgery.

[6]  J. F. Soechting,et al.  Force synergies for multifingered grasping , 2000, Experimental Brain Research.

[7]  Marco Santello,et al.  Tracking whole hand kinematics using extended Kalman filter , 2010, 2010 Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology.

[8]  Manuel G. Catalano,et al.  Adaptive synergies for the design and control of the Pisa/IIT SoftHand , 2014, Int. J. Robotics Res..

[9]  Mircea Nicolescu,et al.  Vision-based hand pose estimation: A review , 2007, Comput. Vis. Image Underst..

[10]  Frank Weichert,et al.  Analysis of the Accuracy and Robustness of the Leap Motion Controller , 2013, Sensors.

[11]  Stephen A. Mascaro,et al.  Optimizing Fingernail Imaging Calibration for 3D Force Magnitude Prediction , 2016, IEEE Transactions on Haptics.

[12]  Raoul Tubiana,et al.  The physiology of the joints vol.1 , 2012 .

[13]  Bor-Shing Lin,et al.  Data glove embedded with 9-axis IMU and force sensing sensors for evaluation of hand function , 2015, 2015 37th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBC).

[14]  Nikolaos G. Tsagarakis,et al.  HEXOTRAC: A highly under-actuated hand exoskeleton for finger tracking and force feedback , 2016, 2016 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS).

[15]  John Kenneth Salisbury,et al.  Contact Sensing from Force Measurements , 1990, Int. J. Robotics Res..

[16]  Matteo Bianchi,et al.  Synergy-based hand pose sensing: Reconstruction enhancement , 2012, Int. J. Robotics Res..

[17]  Matteo Bianchi,et al.  Hand synergies: Integration of robotics and neuroscience for understanding the control of biological and artificial hands. , 2016, Physics of life reviews.

[18]  Edoardo Battaglia,et al.  ThimbleSense: A Fingertip-Wearable Tactile Sensor for Grasp Analysis , 2016, IEEE Transactions on Haptics.

[19]  Roland Siegwart,et al.  A Method for Hand Kinematics Designers7 Billion Perfect Hands , 2010 .

[20]  Pinhas Ben-Tzvi,et al.  Sensing and Force-Feedback Exoskeleton Robotic (SAFER) Glove Mechanism for Hand Rehabilitation , 2015 .

[21]  Piotr Kaczmarek,et al.  CIE-DataGlove, A Multi-IMU System for Hand Posture Tracking , 2017, AUTOMATION.

[22]  Antonis A. Argyros,et al.  Back to RGB: 3D Tracking of Hands and Hand-Object Interactions Based on Short-Baseline Stereo , 2017, 2017 IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision Workshops (ICCVW).

[23]  Antonio Bicchi,et al.  On the problem of decomposing grasp and manipulation forces in multiple whole-limb manipulation , 1994, Robotics Auton. Syst..

[24]  Antonis A. Argyros,et al.  Towards force sensing from vision: Observing hand-object interactions to infer manipulation forces , 2015, 2015 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR).

[25]  Giorgio Grioli,et al.  The Quest for Natural Machine Motion: An Open Platform to Fast-Prototyping Articulated Soft Robots , 2017, IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine.

[26]  S. Roccella,et al.  Bio-inspired sensorization of a biomechatronic robot hand for the grasp-and-lift task , 2008, Brain Research Bulletin.

[27]  Domenico Prattichizzo,et al.  Using inertial and magnetic sensors for hand tracking and rendering in wearable haptics , 2015, 2015 IEEE World Haptics Conference (WHC).

[28]  Antonio Bicchi,et al.  Low-cost, fast and accurate reconstruction of robotic and human postures via IMU measurements , 2015, 2015 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA).

[29]  Matteo Bianchi,et al.  A data-driven kinematic model of the human hand with soft-tissue artifact compensation mechanism for grasp synergy analysis , 2013, 2013 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

[30]  Takashi Maeno,et al.  Underactuated five-finger prosthetic hand inspired by grasping force distribution of humans , 2008, 2008 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

[31]  Pinhas Ben-Tzvi,et al.  The Design Evolution of a Sensing and Force-Feedback Exoskeleton Robotic Glove for Hand Rehabilitation Application , 2016 .

[32]  Qiang Ye,et al.  Force-Sensing Glove System for Measurement of Hand Forces during Motorbike Riding , 2015, Int. J. Distributed Sens. Networks.

[33]  Piyush Kumar,et al.  Hand Data Glove: A Wearable Real-Time Device for Human- Computer Interaction , 2012 .

[34]  Carl D. Meyer,et al.  Matrix Analysis and Applied Linear Algebra , 2000 .