Air Muscle Actuated Low Cost Pneumatic Hand

Peter Scarfe & Euan Lindsay

The control of humanoid robot hands has historically been expensive due to the cost of precision actuators. This project involved the design and implementation of a low-cost air muscle actuated humanoid hand developed at Curtin University of Technology. This hand offers 10 individually controllable degrees of freedom ranging from the elbow to the fingers, with overall control handled through a computer GUI. The hand is actuated through 20 McKibben-style air muscles, each supplied by a pneumatic pressure-balancing valve that allows for proportional control to be achieved with simple and inexpensive components. The hand was successfully able to perform a number of human-equivalent tasks, such as grasping and relocating objects.

Click on the pictures below for enlargements:

The video files below show the hand in action (the mpegs run at a higher speed, but are smaller to download):

Hand Fingers Moving (avi, 0m 09s, 2.2mb) (mpeg-1, 0m 04s, 0.7mb)

Passing The Hand A Biscuit (avi, 0m 35s, 8.2mb) (mpeg-1, 0m 17s, 2.5mb)

Passing The Hand A Tennis Ball (avi, 1m 22s, 20.7mb) (mpeg-1, 0m 41s, 6.3mb)

Picking Up A Horizontal Can (avi, 0m 37s, 8.4mb) (mpeg-1, 0m 18s, 2.6mb)

Picking Up A Vertical Can (avi, 0m 34s, 7.6mb) (mpeg-1, 0m 17s, 2.7mb)

Tendons Muscle Moving (avi, 0m 39s, 9.9mb) (mpeg-1, 0m 19s, 3.6mb)

Thumbs Up (avi, 0m 15s, 3.5mb) (mpeg-1, 0m 07s, 1.2mb)

For more information on this project contact: Peter Scarfe or Euan Lindsay