v11

The Soft Robotics Lab at ETH Zurich has developed a soft skin for dexterous robotic hands. The soft skin allows for ideal contact with a variety of objects and enhances grasp strength. The team also mounted pressure sensors under the skin to classify objects through grasping. They used multi-material 3D printing to optimize the design of the skin, resulting in a structure that does not limit joint motion. The final versions of the finger designs were cast together with a 3D printed palm. 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, sensitized skin for the 5-robotic hand. 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 5-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 molds. After 1 hour of casting and 4 hours of cure time, we spent 1 hour demolding the glass using isopropanol.