I Designed A 3D printed Biomimetic Robotic Hand That Received 1st Place In The 2017 Stratasys Extreme Redesign Competition
UPDATE: The project recieved first place in the 2017 Stratasys Extreme Redesign competition! Link: https://grabcad.com/library/biomimetic-robotic-prosthetic-hand-1
My project is a 3D printed biomimetic robotic prosthetic hand. It is comprised of 3D printed bones, ligaments, tendon sheaths, and supporting structures like the palm and servo tower mounting pieces. In addition, I take advantage of both rigid and flexible materials in my design. I worked on this project for about a year, and it's comprised of 54 different stl files - 20 bones, 14 tendon sheaths, 16 ligaments, 20 tendon guides, 1 palm, 2 servo mounting plates, 6 pulleys, and 1 carpal tunnel. I designed 37 of the 57 unique 3D files for the project. The other 20 are bone files that have been highly modified from the original files to fit my project. The base files before all my changes can be found here: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:15342
My design incorporates the major components of the human hand (bones, ligaments, tendons, tendon sheath, intrinsic muscle) which allows my hand to have human like movement and speed. Instead of using traditional mechanical joints, I followed the blueprint of the human hand, using printed ligaments and laser cut rubber to form a joint capsule, which has had it rewards in terms of performance and improved dexterity over traditional robot hands.
Since my design closely parallel its human counterpart, I can use existing data from how the human hand moves to control the hand. Instead of writing completely new code to control my hand, all I need to do is track my actual hands movement with draw wire sensors and send that data over to the hand. My design makes the software side of this project significantly less complicated
While the actual hand in my project is larger than human scale because of ease of manufacturing, the form factor of my servo motors to control the hand is very similar to the size of my forearm which is the part that the servo array is mimicking.
This project can be printed on a hobbyist 3D printer, the overall cost of the project including motors and other parts can be kept under $600. Also, all of the parts can be printed in about 2 days.
The bones are made of ABS and the rest is made from laser cut rubber and Taulman's PCTPE filament. I also have used Taulmans blue Tglase for a few parts too. (pictures below) The tendons are Spectra deep sea fishing line. The other half of this project is the software side, and my team members are hard at work.
Note: This project is inspired from the research paper below.
Research paper link: https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~todorov/papers/XuICRA16.pdf
My project is a 3D printed biomimetic robotic prosthetic hand. It is comprised of 3D printed bones, ligaments, tendon sheaths, and supporting structures like the palm and servo tower mounting pieces. In addition, I take advantage of both rigid and flexible materials in my design. I worked on this project for about a year, and it's comprised of 54 different stl files - 20 bones, 14 tendon sheaths, 16 ligaments, 20 tendon guides, 1 palm, 2 servo mounting plates, 6 pulleys, and 1 carpal tunnel. I designed 37 of the 57 unique 3D files for the project. The other 20 are bone files that have been highly modified from the original files to fit my project. The base files before all my changes can be found here: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:15342
My design incorporates the major components of the human hand (bones, ligaments, tendons, tendon sheath, intrinsic muscle) which allows my hand to have human like movement and speed. Instead of using traditional mechanical joints, I followed the blueprint of the human hand, using printed ligaments and laser cut rubber to form a joint capsule, which has had it rewards in terms of performance and improved dexterity over traditional robot hands.
Since my design closely parallel its human counterpart, I can use existing data from how the human hand moves to control the hand. Instead of writing completely new code to control my hand, all I need to do is track my actual hands movement with draw wire sensors and send that data over to the hand. My design makes the software side of this project significantly less complicated
While the actual hand in my project is larger than human scale because of ease of manufacturing, the form factor of my servo motors to control the hand is very similar to the size of my forearm which is the part that the servo array is mimicking.
This project can be printed on a hobbyist 3D printer, the overall cost of the project including motors and other parts can be kept under $600. Also, all of the parts can be printed in about 2 days.
The bones are made of ABS and the rest is made from laser cut rubber and Taulman's PCTPE filament. I also have used Taulmans blue Tglase for a few parts too. (pictures below) The tendons are Spectra deep sea fishing line. The other half of this project is the software side, and my team members are hard at work.
Note: This project is inspired from the research paper below.
Research paper link: https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~todorov/papers/XuICRA16.pdf