Everyday Finger: A Robotic Finger that Meets the Needs of Everyday Interactive Manipulation

TL;DR

This paper introduces the 'everyday finger', a compact robotic finger designed with series-elastic actuation to perform a wide range of common manipulation tasks, demonstrating its versatility and effectiveness.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel, compact robotic finger design based on series-elastic actuation tailored for diverse everyday tasks, with experimental validation on a two-finger robotic hand.

Findings

Successfully performed diverse tasks like picking and placing dishes

Able to handle delicate objects such as strawberries

Achieved compact design without compromising performance

Abstract

We provide the mechanical and dynamical requirements for a robotic finger capable of performing thirty diverse everyday tasks. To match these requirements, we present a finger design based on series-elastic actuation that we call the everyday finger. Our focus is to make the fingers as compact as possible while achieving the desired performance. We evaluated everyday fingers by constructing a two-finger robotic hand that was tested on various performance parameters and tasks like picking and placing dishes in a rack, picking thin and flat objects like paper and delicate objects such as strawberries. Videos are available at the project website: https://sites.google.com/view/everydayfinger.