final version

The Soft Robotics Lab at ETH Zurich has developed a soft skin for robotic hands that mimics the human sense of touch. The skin enhances grasp strength without limiting range of motion or speed. They also mounted pressure sensors under the skin to classify objects through grasping. They used a fast prototyping pipeline with multi-material 3D printing to optimize the design. After several iterations, they arrived at a design that does not buckle or limit joint motion. The final finger designs were cast together with a palm in a 3D printed mold. In this video, we present our work on a soft skin for dexterous robotic hands, performed in the Soft Robotics Lab of ETH Zurich. Human hands having flesh and highly innervated skin around the rigid bone structures help us in manipulating objects in daily life. Our soft skin provides ideal contact with a wide range of objects. Our sense of touch also enables us to manipulate without visual cues. Even though it has been shown that tactile sensing can enable similar capabilities for robotic hands, current humanoid hand platforms only mimic our kinematics, but rarely provide soft skins and tactile sensing. In our work, we developed a soft, sensorized skin for the five robotic hands. Our main contributions are the following. We developed a method for fast prototyping and optimizing of a soft skin for our dexterous robotic hand, the five hand. We evaluate the skin through both quasi-static pulling tests and dynamic tests, and show that it enhances grasp strength without limiting range of motion or speed. We then mount custom-made pressure sensors under the skin and show that we can utilize them in classifying objects through grasps. Our fast prototyping pipeline used multi-material 3D printing to optimize the parameters of our complex origami structure, made of DragonSkin10. After 11 iterations, we arrived to a design that does not buckle or limit joint motion. The final versions of our finger designs were cast together with a palm in 3D printed mold. After one hour of casting and four hours of cure time, we spent one hour demolding the glass using isopropanol.