Soft robotic hand with tactile palm-finger coordination.

Journal: Nature communications
PMID: 40064944

Abstract

Soft robotic hands with integrated sensing capabilities hold great potential for interactive operations. Previous work has typically focused on integrating sensors with fingers. The palm, as a large and crucial contact region providing mechanical support and sensory feedback, remains underexplored due to the currently limited sensing density and interaction with the fingers. Here, we develop a sensorized robotic hand that integrates a high-density tactile palm, dexterous soft fingers, and cooperative palm-finger interaction strategies. The palm features a compact visual-tactile design to capture delicate contact information. The soft fingers are designed as fiber-reinforced pneumatic actuators, each providing two-segment motions for multimodal grasping. These features enable extensive palm-finger interactions, offering mutual benefits such as improved grasping stability, automatic exquisite surface reconstruction, and accurate object classification. We also develop palm-finger feedback strategies to enable dynamic tasks, including planar object pickup, continuous flaw detection, and grasping pose adjustment. Furthermore, our development, augmented by artificial intelligence, shows improved potential for human-robot collaboration. Our results suggest the promise of fusing rich palm tactile sensing with soft dexterous fingers for advanced interactive robotic operations.

Authors

  • Ningbin Zhang
    State Key Laboratory of Mechanical System and Vibration, Shanghai Jiao Tong University; Robotics Institute, School of Mechanical Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University.
  • Jieji Ren
    Robotics Institute, School of Mechanical Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China.
  • Yueshi Dong
    Robotics Institute, School of Mechanical Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China.
  • Xinyu Yang
    Department of Gastroenterology, The First Affiliated Hospital of Zhejiang Chinese Medical University, Hangzhou, China.
  • Rong Bian
    Robotics Institute, School of Mechanical Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China.
  • Jinhao Li
    Robotics Institute, School of Mechanical Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China.
  • Guoying Gu
    State Key Laboratory of Mechanical System and Vibration, Shanghai Jiao Tong University; Robotics Institute, School of Mechanical Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University; guguoying@sjtu.edu.cn.
  • Xiangyang Zhu

Keywords

External Resources

Popular Topics
Recent Journals