Shadow hand and human hand size comparison

The Shadow Dexterous Hand is a

humanoid A humanoid (; from English ''human'' and '' -oid'' "resembling") is a non-human entity with human form or characteristics. By the 20th century, the term came to describe fossils which were morphologically similar, but not identical, to those of ...

robot A robot is a machine—especially one Computer program, programmable by a computer—capable of carrying out a complex series of actions Automation, automatically. A robot can be guided by an external control device, or the robot control, co ...

hand A hand is a prehensile, multi-fingered appendage located at the end of the forearm or forelimb of primates such as humans, chimpanzees, monkeys, and lemurs. A few other vertebrates such as the Koala#Characteristics, koala (which has two thumb#O ...

system developed by The Shadow Robot Company in

London London is the Capital city, capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of both England and the United Kingdom, with a population of in . London metropolitan area, Its wider metropolitan area is the largest in Wester ...

. The hand is comparable to a human hand in size and shape, and reproduces all of its

degrees of freedom In many scientific fields, the degrees of freedom of a system is the number of parameters of the system that may vary independently. For example, a point in the plane has two degrees of freedom for translation: its two coordinates; a non-infinite ...

. The Hand is commercially available in pneumatic- and electric-actuated models and currently used in a wide range of institutions including

NASA The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA ) is an independent agencies of the United States government, independent agency of the federal government of the United States, US federal government responsible for the United States ...

Bielefeld University Bielefeld University () is a public university in Bielefeld, Germany. Founded in 1969, it is one of the country's newer universities, and considers itself a "reform" university, following a different style of organization and teaching than the e ...

and

Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. The institution was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools. In 1912, it became the Carnegie Institu ...

, and EU research projects such as HANDLE. The Shadow Dexterous Robot Hand is the first commercially available robot hand from the company, and follows a series of prototype humanoid hand and arm systems.

Design

The Shadow Dexterous Hand has been designed to be similar to the average hand of a human male. The forearm structure is slightly wider than a human forearm. The Shadow Dexterous Hand has 24 joints. It has 20 degrees of freedom, greater than that of a human hand. It has been designed to have a range of movement equivalent to that of a typical

human being Humans (''Homo sapiens'') or modern humans are the most common and widespread species of primate, and the last surviving species of the genus ''Homo''. They are Hominidae, great apes characterized by their Prehistory of nakedness and clothing ...

. The four fingers of the hand contain two one-axis joints connecting the distal

phalanx The phalanx (: phalanxes or phalanges) was a rectangular mass military formation, usually composed entirely of heavy infantry armed with spears, pikes, sarissas, or similar polearms tightly packed together. The term is particularly used t ...

, middle phalanx and proximal phalanx and one

universal joint A universal joint (also called a universal coupling or U-joint) is a joint or coupling connecting rigid shafts whose axes are inclined to each other. It is commonly used in shafts that transmit rotary motion. It consists of a pair of hinges ...

connecting the finger to the

metacarpal In human anatomy, the metacarpal bones or metacarpus, also known as the "palm bones", are the appendicular bones that form the intermediate part of the hand between the phalanges (fingers) and the carpal bones ( wrist bones), which articulate ...

. The little finger has an extra one-axis joint on the metacarpal to provide the Hand with a palm curl movement. The thumb contains one one-axis joint connecting the distal phalanx to the proximal phalanx, one universal joint connecting the thumb to the metacarpal and one one-axis joint on the bottom of the metacarpal to provide a palm curl movement. The wrist contains two joints, providing flex/extend and adduct/abduct. The hand is available in both electric motor driven and pneumatic muscle driven models. The motor hand is driven by 20 DC motors in the forearm, whereas the muscle hand is powered by 20 antagonistic pairs of Air Muscles in the forearm. All hands have

Hall effect The Hall effect is the production of a voltage, potential difference (the Hall voltage) across an electrical conductor that is wikt:transverse, transverse to an electric current in the conductor and to an applied magnetic field wikt:perpendicul ...

sensors integrated into every joint to provide precise positional feedback. The motor hand includes force sensors for each degree of freedom and the muscle hand includes pressure sensors for each muscle. There are also several options for tactile sensing on the hand from basic pressure sensors to the BioTac multimodal tactile sensor fro
Syntouch Inc.
The Shadow Hand software system is based on

Robot Operating System Robot Operating System (ROS or ros) is an Open-source software, open-source robotics middleware suite. Although ROS is not an operating system (OS) but a set of software frameworks for robot software software development, development, it provide ...

, through which configuration, calibration, simulation and control of the hand is implemented. A simulation of the Shadow hand can be downloaded and installed in ROS.

References

External links

Shadow Dexterous Robot Hand home page
* Dungchuot7
Shadow Dexterous Robot Hand Technical Specification
{{Webarchive, url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130510102833/http://www.shadowrobot.com/wp-content/uploads/shadow_dexterous_hand_technical_specification_E1_20130101.pdf , date=2013-05-10 * A to Z of Robotics Article
The Shadow Hand on Robotnik.es

BioTac multimodal tactile sensor from Syntouch LLC
Robot hands Robots of the United Kingdom 2000s robots

Design

See also

Further reading

References

External links