A Hybrid, Wearable Exoskeleton Glove Equipped With Variable Stiffness Joints, Abduction Capabilities, and a Telescopic Thumb

Abstract

Robotic hand exoskeletons have become a popular and efficient technological solution for assisting people that suffer from neurological conditions and for enhancing the capabilities of healthy individuals. This class of devices ranges from rigid and complex structures to soft, lightweight, wearable gloves. In this work, we propose a hybrid (tendon-driven and pneumatic), lightweight, affordable, easy-to-operate exoskeleton glove equipped with variable stiffness, laminar jamming structures, abduction/adduction capabilities, and a pneumatic telescopic extra thumb that increases grasp stability. The efficiency of the proposed device is experimentally validated through five different types of experiments: i) abduction/adduction tests, ii) force exertion experiments that capture the forces that can be exerted by the proposed device under different conditions, iii) bending profile experiments that evaluate the effect of the laminar jamming structures on the way the fingers bend, iv) grasp quality assessment experiments that focus on the effect of the inflatable thumb on enhancing grasp stability, and v) grasping experiments involving everyday objects and seven subjects. The hybrid assistive, exoskeleton glove considerably improves the grasping capabilities of the user, being able to exert the forces required to execute a plethora of activities of daily living. All files that allow the replication of the device are distributed in an open-source manner.

Leveraging Human Perception in Robot Grasping and Manipulation Through Crowdsourcing and Gamification

“…The device is composed of a glove, a tendon-driven system with six tendons (five tendons for finger flexion and one for thumb opposition), and a pneumatic system that consists of four soft actuators and five laminar jamming structures. More details regarding the exoskeleton glove design and operation can be found in Gerez et al ( 2020 ). A small camera (Raspberry Pi Camera Module V2, Raspberry Pi Foundation, UK) was mounted on the palm of the robotic exoskeleton glove to capture images for the object tracking algorithm during task execution.…”

Human augmentation by wearable supernumerary robotic limbs: review and perspectives

“…More recently, innovative design techniques were introduced for building intrinsically compliant supernumerary fingers. Singh et al [60] developed bidirectional pneumatic actuators which can be assembled to form a soft robotic finger, whereas Gerez et al [61] presented a soft telescopic extra thumb embedded in an exoskeleton glove.…”

“…foot, forehead). Only one of the analyzed papers goes in the direction of portability, proposing to control an extra finger through a smartphone application [61].…”

Control of Newly-Designed Wearable Robotic Hand Exoskeleton Based on Surface Electromyographic Signals

“…From structure design, the hand exoskeleton could be divided into pneumatic, glove-based, and linkage-based exoskeletons. The pneumatic exoskeleton is easy to control, but is difficult to perform flexible finger movement (Gerez et al, 2020 ; Takahashi et al, 2020 ). Glove-based exoskeletons are usually more supple and comfortable to wear; but due to the coverage of the glove, it blocks the direct contact of the object and, thus, disturbs tactile feedback (Sarac et al, 2019 ).…”

“…The human hand has a flexible thumb but most of the hand exoskeletons use only one actuator to control thumb movement (Li et al, 2016 ; Burns et al, 2019 ; Gasser et al, 2020 ). The flexion/extension of the fingers and the abduction/adduction of the thumb are two of the most important exercises to improve hand function (Gerez et al, 2020 ). An intriguing issue is how to design an exoskeleton with more than one actuator for the thumb to realize both flexion/extension and abduction/adduction.…”