The University of Science and Technology of China and its collaborators have successfully developed a set of lightweight bionic dexterity hands with 19 degrees of freedom

Bionic dexterous hands can reproduce human-level functions, which not only improves the dexterous operation capabilities of humanoid robots, but is also expected to provide hand function reconstruction and daily life assistance services for millions of upper-limb amputees around the world.

The human hand has 23 degrees of freedom and weighs only about 1/150 of the human body, but it is responsible for 54% of the body’s movement functions and is a key manifestation of human work ability.

The research team used high power-to-weight ratio shape memory alloy (SMA) as the artificial muscle driver and bionicly designed a tendon-like transmission system, which successfully amplified the driving force of the SMA and reduced the transmission resistance. By embedding 23 sets of sensing units in fingers and wrists, the research team achieved precise motion control of joints.

The bionic dexterous hand integrates 38 array-type SMA actuators including cooling modules, allowing it to achieve flexible movement with 19 degrees of freedom.

Thanks to the bionic design and high-density integration, the dexterous hand weighs only 0.37 kilograms, but has human-level dexterity and can complete daily fine operation tasks such as combing hair, writing, shaking hands, handing business cards, and playing chess. In addition, its maximum load capacity is 2.5 kg, which is enough to meet the daily needs of patients.

The research team combines it with iFlytek’s speech recognition technology to give prosthetic dexterous hands simple, friendly and low-cost human-computer interaction capabilities. The dexterous hand supports 60 languages and 20 dialects, with a recognition accuracy of up to 95% and a response time of only milliseconds, which greatly improves the user experience.

In clinical testing, a 60-year-old female amputee mastered the use of the prosthetic dexterous hand in just half a day, and successfully completed a number of representative tasks in standard prosthetic hand function evaluation experiments, such as grasping, operating, turning books, fastening and other common daily operations.

What is even more amazing is that the dexterous hand can also operate scissors, use mobile phones and complete complex sign language gestures. It accurately reproduces 33 traditional human hand grasping movements and can complete 6 new and more difficult grasping movements, showing a wide range of application scenarios.

Information source: Quick Technology