Pneumatic and tendon‐driven actuators are widely used in soft robotic glove design. Tendon‐driven robotic gloves are generally better in controllability, dexterity, and force output, but they are less comfortable than pneumatic ones. Most soft gloves focus on only one actuation mode where either motor‐driven tendon or pump‐driven pneumatic transmission is used. Herein, a double‐acting soft actuator (DASA) that provides both tendon‐driven flexion and pneumatic extension of fingers by a single motor is presented. This is achieved by a smart pulley and bellow system. The kinematic model of the tendon‐driven flexion and the torque model of the fabric‐based pneumatic extension actuator (FPEA) are developed to analyze the DASA performance. The bending angle of the index finger actuated by the tendon and the FPEA extension torque of a joint are characterized by experimental studies. A cycle test of the DASA is conducted 3000 times, demonstrating its high repeatability. A prototype soft glove (68 g) based on the proposed DASA with a control box (835 g) is fabricated to demonstrate finger flexion and extension assistance. Based on electromyography signals, the performance of the robotic glove is evaluated by a squeezing sponge test.
Surface electromyogram pattern recognition (EMG-PR) requires time-consuming training and retrainingprocedures for long-term use, hindering the usability of myoelectric control. In this paper, we design a fabric myoelectric armband to reduce the electrode shifts. Furthermore, we propose a fully unsupervised adaptive approach called hybrid serial classifier (HSC) to eliminate the burden of retraining over multiply days. We investigated the performance of our approach with a dataset of ten types of forearm motion from ten male subjects over eight weeks (total ten days, including: from day 1 to day 7, day 14, day
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.