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Arduino Robotic Hand with Haptic Feedback

by macgyver603 on February 27, 2012

Table of Contents

Arduino Robotic Hand with Haptic Feedback . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Intro: Arduino Robotic Hand with Haptic Feedback . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2

Related Instructables . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

http://www.instructables.com/id/Arduino-Robotic-Hand-with-Haptic-Feedback/
Intro: Arduino Robotic Hand with Haptic Feedback
This year for science fair, I did an engineering project with the goal of creating a system to provide haptic feedback from a robotic hand. The robotic hand is controlled by
flex resistors on a glove worn on someone's hand, and an Arduino converts finger positions on the glove to finger positions on the robotic hand. Each of the fingertips of
the robotic hand have their own force sensitive resistors(FSR) to gather information about pressure at each fingertip, and another Arduino converts the pressures to
pulses for vibrator motors located on the fingers of the control gloves. I used two separate Arduinos since they only have 6 analog inputs each, and I needed 8. It also
helped simplify the code a bit, since I used one Arduino for controlling the finger positions and the other for controlling the motor pulses. Also, I already had the two
Arduinos, so I used them instead of buying an Arduino Mega or multiplexers. Anyway, the pressure readings are taken once every second, and the motors are on for a
portion of each second depending on the pressure measurements. This means that the system is only accurate for a little bit each second, but the measurement intervals
could easily be changed in the code.

For the robotic hand, I sketched up a basic design in Autodesk and used the assembler feature to play around with and fine tune some of the finger measurements. Once
I had my design ready, I took it to my local hackerspace and got all of the parts laser cut out of an acrylic sheet that was about 5mm in thickness. I bolted all of the finger
parts together. As for attaching the fingers to the palm, I scratched the areas where the acrylic overlapped and glued the parts together. The glue worked fine, but if I
build another hand, they will be bolted on. There were also a few issues with the placement of holes on the finger segments, but a bit of glue helped anchor the bolts
down. To avoid this problem on later designs, I will use smaller bolts and try to cut out as much overlapping material as possible.

For wiring everything together, I found stripped CAT-5 cable rather convenient. It is a little stiff, but it comes out as pre-twisted pairs of wire.

Also, there are only four fingers on the hand since there was only room for four servos on the palm area. To get a thumb in future designs, I will either move one of the
robotic fingers to the side and move the sensors around on the glove, or just buy some smaller servos to make everything fit.

In all, the project turned out well and provided a great starting point for future projects. I will eventually come back to this project, and when I do, I will definitely turn it into
a step-by-step Instructable.

Image Notes
1. Originally, I was going to have the parts for the hand printed, but the printer
was not working properly.
2. My first finger prototype

Image Notes
1. The procedure including two pages of Arduino code

http://www.instructables.com/id/Arduino-Robotic-Hand-with-Haptic-Feedback/
 Image Notes
1. This is one of the FSRs. I glued them on to the fingertips so the pads would
make contact with the object it was grabbing.
2. The servos are hooked to the fingers with the same parts that are used for
steering an RC car.
3. The finger base was glued on here. There was room for a bolt in the original
design, but it was in the wrong dimension, as you will see later.

Image Notes
1. Each finger segment basically creates a four-bar linkage with the next
segment. When the base is moved, all of the other segments move with it.

http://www.instructables.com/id/Arduino-Robotic-Hand-with-Haptic-Feedback/
 Image Notes Image Notes
1. Flex resistor 1. SHE NEEDS MORE POWER!!
2. Vibrator motors 2. The four parts sets along with the palm and a spare set. The laser cutter
power was set too low for two of the fingers, so one came out a bit rough and the
other one did not come out at all.

Image Notes Image Notes

1. Some of the spare parts 1. The FSR on a breadboard with a voltage divider

Image Notes
1. Laser cutters do not work in three dimensions(at least not yet), so this hole is
non-existent in the final hand.

http://www.instructables.com/id/Arduino-Robotic-Hand-with-Haptic-Feedback/
 Image Notes
1. The hand put together in Autodesk. The palm is thinner in the actual hand
since it is cut out of acrylic. I had originally intended for it to be printed, so that is
why it is so thick.

Image Notes
1. Another view of the hand. The fingers are angled to help simulate a real
hand.

Image Notes
1. The motor!

Image Notes Image Notes

1. My original finger was based more on the human hand, where there is a 1. The original fingers turned out to be a bit too heavy and cumbersome, but they
tendon pulling it shut, rather than bars pushing it shut. look pretty cool nevertheless.
http://www.instructables.com/id/Arduino-Robotic-Hand-with-Haptic-Feedback/
 Image Notes
1. The final project went well, and was able to get first place in Engineering for
the school science fair.

Related Instructables

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Turret by Lion Dance Feedback Wireless Transformation
RazorConcepts Arduino (video) by tonll device for the Animatronic (2 Robots
animatronics- Visually Hand by njkl44 Merging Into 1)
make your Impaired (video) by tonll
awesome [Project HALO]
costumes more by polymythic
awesome! by
Honus

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