Design and implementation of dexterous hand master (DHM) for teleoperation

number: 
1619
English
Degree: 
Author: 
Aula Ali Issa
Supervisor: 
Dr. Noaman M. Noaman
year: 
2006
Abstract:

Dexterous Hand Master (DHM) is one of exoskeletal controlling devices used to measure the positions of an operator’s hand, and utilize these positions to control the motion of a remote manipulator or slave. pplications motivating development of such device have ranged from the control of a remote dexterous robot hand in physical applications, to manipulate motions of a virtual hand. A simplified kinematics model of human hand was developed to meet ability of a proposed DHM glove. Only flexion/extension movements for fingers joints were taken into consideration in the designed model. An electrical circuit was designed and connected for interfacing the DHM glove with the PC. This circuit multiplexes and translates analog signals from all glove’s sensors into digital data read through PC’s parallel port (LPT). It consists of A/D converter and Analog multiplexing circuit, resistors and capacitors of different ratings and connecting wires. The proposed DHM was used to control movements of a virtual slave hand, which was a computer generated image for right human hand. Hand movements were input directly via arrows keys of computer keyboard. Software was developed to control the operation of the interface circuit, process the obtained data and generate the virtual hand depending on the obtained positions. It was developed using Visual Basic v.6 programming anguage.The proposed DHM characterized by using potentiometer as bend sensors, mounted on dorsal side of exoskeleton structure enabling a full hand closing but restricted used with variety of hand size. It’s allow wide number of different hand postures, provides a total of 10DOF (Degree of Freedom) obtained from the ten sensors attached on the glove (2 DOF for five fingers including the thumb). The weight of the proposed DHM exoskeleton structure was approximately 130g. Glove’s connecting wires had a 1.5m length, providing large work space (1.5m radius hemisphere) for user arm, whether the user was sitting or standing.