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Improving In-Hand Manipulation Skills With Constraints Provided by a Second Thumb
Thursday, 21. April 2022
Earliest start date: 01.11.2022
The thumb can be considered the most important finger of the human hand for handling objects. Compared to the other fingers, the thumb has much greater range of motion. This allows the thumb to flexibly place contacts and exert a variety of forces on an object held in the hand. The thumb design of the latest RBO Hand 3 (RH3) allows our hand to behave more skillfully than prior versions. In this work, you will investitage a two-thumb design of the RH3, with the goal of being able to flexibly provide contacts to improve manipulation capabilities in the hand.
Description of work
To extend the current version of the RBO Hand 3 with a second thumb an understanding of the kinematic capabilities the hand is providing is required. First, you will review different measures on how to access the reconfigurability of a dexterous robotic hand. Second, you will choose a suitable measure or modify it to match our needs. Third, you will design an initial version of a second thumb and evaluated in simulation. Third, the second thumb design should be optimized to tackle some real world manipulation tasks.