Experiencing ones own hand in telexistence manipulation with a 15 DOF anthropomorphic robot hand and a flexible master glove

Abstract

This paper describes a new type of robust control mechanism for a 15 DOF anthropomorphic robot hand in telexistence manipulations using a flexible fiber based master glove to experience the visual-kinesthetic sensation of one's own hand in remote manipulations. Accordingly, a master-slave telexistence system was constructed with the following: a 14 DOF modified optical fiber based data glove for capturing the complex finger postures of the master operator without any mechanical constraints; a novel finger posture mapping algorithm that is independent from the effects of different finger sizes and digit ratios; and a 15 DOF anthropomorphic slave robot hand for reconstructing the operators finger posture. This paper describes the importance of feeling one's fingers in a telexistence manipulation, control mechanism for accurate finger posture capture/reconstruction where the effectiveness has been verified through a set of experiments and a subjective evaluation.