A Soft Humanoid Hand with In-Finger Visual Perception
Felix Hundhausen, Julia Starke, Tamim Asfour

TL;DR
This paper introduces a soft humanoid hand with integrated fingertip cameras and onboard visual processing, demonstrating durable grasping and high-accuracy object segmentation for advanced robotic manipulation.
Contribution
The paper presents a novel soft humanoid hand with embedded visual sensors and a hybrid FPGA-microcontroller system for real-time image processing, advancing soft robotics capabilities.
Findings
Grasp force of 31.8 N achieved
Finger durability exceeds 15,000 cycles
Object segmentation accuracy above 90%
Abstract
We present a novel underactued humanoid five finger soft hand, the KIT \softhand, which is equipped with cameras in the fingertips and integrates a high performance embedded system for visual processing and control. We describe the actuation mechanism of the hand and the tendon-driven soft finger design with internally routed high-bandwidth flat-flex cables. For efficient on-board parallel processing of visual data from the cameras in each fingertip, we present a hybrid embedded architecture consisting of a field programmable logic array (FPGA) and a microcontroller that allows the realization of visual object segmentation based on convolutional neural networks. We evaluate the hand design by conducting durability experiments with one finger and quantify the grasp performance in terms of grasping force, speed and grasp success. The results show that the hand exhibits a grasp force of…
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