Robotics and Biology Laboratory

Vision-Based Teleoperation of the Compliant RBO Hand 3

Motivation

Most models in contact dynamics show some unrealistic behavior due to assumptions that were made for the  sake of computational convenience. Unfortunately, there is a lack of experimental work to validate these assumptions and to evaluate how realistic these contact modeling approaches are, which is the purpose of this thesis.

Description of the Work

Using an off-the-shelf computer vision tool, a multi-camera setup tracks the user’s human hand and wrist postures, and estimates the 3D hand pose employing an underlying kinematic model to exploit the knowledge about the human hand. Changing into joint space, the human joint angles are mapped to the RBO Hand 3, first in simulation, then on the robotic hand. Afterwards, experiments are conducted to evaluate the quality of the teleoperation setup for generating complex in-hand manipulations.