Use of a human-centered manual interaction patterns analysis methodology for the specification of dexterous robotic grippers

Abstract

The advent of robots in our daily life depends on their ability to navigate and intervene efficiently in our environment. Whether considering household or industrial applications, one of the most important functions they should have is the ability to grasp and manipulate a large amount of objects, tools and machines that can vary in form, size and weight, but share the fact that they were designed for humans and have functional elements, e.g. buttons or handles, fitted to the human hand. The development of biologically inspired anthropomorphic robotic hands thus appears as a natural research path to allow robots replicating these activities. Such devices however prove to be complex to design and control, and they remain in practice limited to date to laboratory experiments. They hardly reach a sufficient simplicity, robustness and cost allowing for their widespread adoption in our houses or factories and industrial robots still make use of simple bi-digital grippers or dedicated tools which in turn suffer a poor versatility. To overcome this situation, novel dexterous grippers are required, that are sufficiently versatile to adapt to various situations and objects yet simple enough and cost effective. This compromise is however difficult to achieve and the specification of such grippers is still an open issue. This paper introduces a human-centered manual interaction patterns analysis methodology that intends to contribute to fill this gap. After a presentation of our approach, we apply it in different contexts and show how it can be used to orient a robotic gripper design that will fit given use-case requirements.