Flex sensor based wearable gloves for robotic gripper control

Abstract

Wearable technology has become an integral part of modern era where it governs the human machine interface to a great extent. This is the easiest way of communication between human and machine in the form of control or commands. One such device is wearable glove which is extensively used in commercial applications such as gaming, entertainment, device control as well as robotics and medical industries. These gloves are using different types of sensor for gathering information on finger position. This work describes one such effort to develop wearable glove based on flex sensor, its advantages, limitations and feasibility of implementation for robotic application. The glove is designed using open source arduino platform. Each flex sensor is calibrated for its optimized performance and software implementation is done accordingly. Performance of the wearable glove is visualized on a desktop PC using self developed stance visualization software. A 3D model of robotic gripper/hand is used for this purpose.