Third-party Evaluation of Robotic Hand Designs Using a Mechanical Glove

TL;DR

This paper introduces a mechanical glove for evaluating robotic hand designs, enabling functional testing of dexterity and degrees-of-freedom through human trials, marking a novel comprehensive assessment method.

Contribution

It presents the first extensive evaluation framework for robotic hand designs using a mechanical glove and human performance testing.

Findings

Effective assessment of multiple DOFs in robotic hands.

Human participants demonstrated the glove's utility in fine motor skill evaluation.

The method provides a new standard for robotic hand dexterity testing.

Abstract

A robotic hand design suitable for dexterity should be examined using functional tests. To achieve this, we designed a mechanical glove, which is a rigid wearable glove that enables us to develop the corresponding isomorphic robotic hand and evaluate its hardware properties. Subsequently, the effectiveness of multiple degrees-of-freedom (DOFs) was evaluated by human participants. Several fine motor skills were evaluated using the mechanical glove under two conditions: one- and three-DOF conditions. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first extensive evaluation method for robotic hand designs suitable for dexterity. (This paper was peer-reviewed and is the full translation from the Journal of the Robotics Society of Japan, Vol.39, No.6, pp.557-560, 2021.)