Tendon-Driven Agonistic/Antagonistic Actuation for Variable Stiffness in Robotic Hands

Institute

Professur für Healthcare and Rehabilitation Robotics

Type

Bachelor's Thesis / Semester Thesis / Master's Thesis /

Content

experimental / constructive /  

Description

Background:

As robots transition into service and household environments, they need to interact with a larger variety of objects compared to standardized industrial processes. Therefore, robots need to have more versatile end effectors which allow them to grasp and manipulate household objects. Human hands are a very powerful tool for grasping with 21 degrees of freedom, around 30,000 nerves to transmit muscle activation signal and around 300,000 nerves to transmit sensory feedback from the hands.

At the Professorship of Healthcare and Rehabilitation Robotics, we aim to replicate the functionality of robotic hands with research focused on soft articulated robotic hands, human-machine-interfacing and embodiment of prosthetic devices.

Topic:

The goal of this project is to develop an anthropomorphically-inspired actuation system for a finger of our soft articulated robotic hand based on agonistic/antagonistic tendon-drives to achieve independent control of the position/force applied by the finger and its stiffness. The system should be validated by grasping rigid (e.g. glass bottle) and soft objects (e.g. raspberry) without damaging those.

Tasks:

• Literature review of existing variable stiffness solutions
• Prototyping hardware systems
• System modelling and control of the variable stiffness mechanism
• Experimental analysis of grasp success with the variable stiffness mechanism

Requirements

Requirements: 

• Background in Mechanical Engineering, Robotics, Mechatronics or Biomedical Engineering
• Previous experience with microcontrollers, DC motors, CAD and 3D printing beneficial
• Hands-on mentality, self-driven, willingness to learn and ambition to tackle big research challenges

If you are interested in the topic, please send me an e-mail including your CV and grade reports.

Possible start

sofort

Contact

Tobias Geissenberger
Room: Siemens Technology Center C2.013
tobias.geissenbergertum.de