Wearable Robotic Glove Design Using Surface-Mounted Actuators

Abstract

We propose a novel wearable robotic glove or exo-glove design scalable to the variation of the hand kinematics. While most of the traditional robot hand is driven by rotating the joint directly with a rigid body, our exo-glove deforms a robotic finger's skin and, thus, the hand skeleton joints. Multiple tendons woven on the exo-glove's surface can make multi-DOF finger joint motions. We allocated tendons to mimic a hand's intrinsic and extrinsic muscles. Thus, a robotic hand actuated with the exo-glove can perform natural finger motions, including abduction/adduction and flexion/extension of finger joints. Moreover, additional tendons for the thumb enable power grips and the robotic hand's human-like motion. The proposed design approach places all the actuators on the surface without directly actuating any of the hand skeleton's joint. Therefore, a random hand skeleton can work as a robotic hand by putting the wearable robotic glove on it. Thus, the proposed model provides a high degree of freedom on choosing hand skeletons. We expect the aforementioned biomimetic features of our proposed method will benefit not only traditional robotic hands design but also the design of prosthetic hands and robot power-assisted hand glove.