“The Human Hand as an Inspiration for Robot Hand Development” presents an edited collection of authoritative contributions in the area of robot hands. The results described in the volume are expected to lead to more robust, dependable, and inexpensive distributed systems such as those endowed with complex and advanced sensing, actuation, computation, and communication capabilities. The twenty-four chapters discuss the field of robotic grasping and manipulation viewed in light of the human hand’s capabilities and push the state-of-the-art in robot hand design and control. Topics discussed include human hand biomechanics, neural control, sensory feedback and perception, and robotic grasp and manipulation. This book will be useful for researchers from diverse areas such as robotics, biomechanics, neuroscience, and anthropologists.
In this comprehensive textbook about robot grasping, readers will discover an integrated look at the major concepts and technical results in robot grasp mechanics. A large body of prior research, including key theories, graphical techniques, and insights on robot hand designs, is organized into a systematic review, using common notation and a common analytical framework. With introductory and advanced chapters that support senior undergraduate and graduate level robotics courses, this book provides a full introduction to robot grasping principles that are needed to model and analyze multi-finger robot grasps, and serves as a valuable reference for robotics students, researchers, and practicing robot engineers. Each chapter contains many worked-out examples, exercises with full solutions, and figures that highlight new concepts and help the reader master the use of the theories and equations presented.
Since the 1970s the cognitive sciences have offered multidisciplinary ways of understanding the mind and cognition. The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences (MITECS) is a landmark, comprehensive reference work that represents the methodological and theoretical diversity of this changing field. At the core of the encyclopedia are 471 concise entries, from Acquisition and Adaptationism to Wundt and X-bar Theory. Each article, written by a leading researcher in the field, provides an accessible introduction to an important concept in the cognitive sciences, as well as references or further readings. Six extended essays, which collectively serve as a roadmap to the articles, provide overviews of each of six major areas of cognitive science: Philosophy; Psychology; Neurosciences; Computational Intelligence; Linguistics and Language; and Culture, Cognition, and Evolution. For both students and researchers, MITECS will be an indispensable guide to the current state of the cognitive sciences.
Grasping in Robotics contains original contributions in the field of grasping in robotics with a broad multidisciplinary approach. This gives the possibility of addressing all the major issues related to robotized grasping, including milestones in grasping through the centuries, mechanical design issues, control issues, modelling achievements and issues, formulations and software for simulation purposes, sensors and vision integration, applications in industrial field and non-conventional applications (including service robotics and agriculture). The contributors to this book are experts in their own diverse and wide ranging fields. This multidisciplinary approach can help make Grasping in Robotics of interest to a very wide audience. In particular, it can be a useful reference book for researchers, students and users in the wide field of grasping in robotics from many different disciplines including mechanical design, hardware design, control design, user interfaces, modelling, simulation, sensors and humanoid robotics. It could even be adopted as a reference textbook in specific PhD courses.
Bionics evolved in the 1960s as a framework to pursue the development of artificial systems based on the study of biological systems. Numerous disciplines and technologies, including artificial intelligence and learningdevices, information processing, systems architecture and control, perception, sensory mechanisms, and bioenergetics, contributed to bionics research. This volume is based on a NATO Advanced Research Workshop within the Special Programme on Sensory Systems for Robotic Control, held in Il Ciocco, Italy, in June 1989. A consensus emerged at the workshop, and is reflected in the book, on the value of learning from nature in order to derive guidelines for the design of intelligent machines which operate in unstructured environments. The papers in the book are grouped into seven chapters: vision and dynamic systems, hands and tactile perception, locomotion, intelligent motor control, design technologies, interfacing robots to nervous systems, and robot societies and self-organization.
This is a cornerstone publication in robotic grasping. The authors have developed an internationally recognized expertise in this area. Additionally, they designed and built several prototypes which attracted the attention of the scientific community. The purpose of this book is to summarize years of research and to present, in an attractive format, the expertise developed by the authors on a new technology for grasping which has achieved great success both in theory and in practice.
An in-depth review of hybrid control techniques for smart prosthetic hand technology by two of the world’s pioneering experts in the field Long considered the stuff of science fiction, a prosthetic hand capable of fully replicating all of that appendage’s various functions is closer to becoming reality than ever before. This book provides a comprehensive report on exciting recent developments in hybrid control techniques—one of the most crucial hurdles to be overcome in creating smart prosthetic hands. Coauthored by two of the world’s foremost pioneering experts in the field, Fusion of Hard and Soft Control Strategies for Robotic Hand treats robotic hands for multiple applications. Itbegins withan overview of advances in main control techniques that have been made over the past decade before addressing the military context for affordable robotic hand technology with tactile and/or proprioceptive feedback for hand amputees. Kinematics, homogeneous transformations, inverse and differential kinematics, trajectory planning, and dynamic models of two-link thumb and three-link index finger are discussed in detail. The remainder of the book is devoted to the most promising soft computing techniques, particle swarm optimization techniques, and strategies combining hard and soft controls. In addition, the book: Includes a report on exciting new developments in prosthetic/robotic hand technology, with an emphasis on the fusion of hard and soft control strategies Covers both prosthetic and non-prosthetic hand designs for everything from routine human operations, robotic surgery, and repair and maintenance, to hazardous materials handling, space applications, explosives disposal, and more Provides a comprehensive overview of five-fingered robotic hand technology kinematics, dynamics, and control Features detailed coverage of important recent developments in neuroprosthetics Fusion of Hard and Soft Control Strategies for Robotic Hand is a must-read for researchers in control engineering, robotic engineering, biomedical sciences and engineering, and rehabilitation engineering.
This book looks at the common problems both human and robotic hands encounter when controlling the large number of joints, actuators and sensors required to efficiently perform motor tasks such as object exploration, manipulation and grasping. The authors adopt an integrated approach to explore the control of the hand based on sensorimotor synergies that can be applied in both neuroscience and robotics. Hand synergies are based on goal-directed, combined muscle and kinematic activation leading to a reduction of the dimensionality of the motor and sensory space, presenting a highly effective solution for the fast and simplified design of artificial systems. Presented in two parts, the first part, Neuroscience, provides the theoretical and experimental foundations to describe the synergistic organization of the human hand. The second part, Robotics, Models and Sensing Tools, exploits the framework of hand synergies to better control and design robotic hands and haptic/sensing systems/tools, using a reduced number of control inputs/sensors, with the goal of pushing their effectiveness close to the natural one. Human and Robot Hands provides a valuable reference for students, researchers and designers who are interested in the study and design of the artificial hand.
Robot arms have been developing since 1960's, and those are widely used in industrial factories such as welding, painting, assembly, transportation, etc. Nowadays, the robot arms are indispensable for automation of factories. Moreover, applications of the robot arms are not limited to the industrial factory but expanded to living space or outer space. The robot arm is an integrated technology, and its technological elements are actuators, sensors, mechanism, control and system, etc.
