Qu'il s'agisse de saisir, de tenir ou de tourner, de toucher, de taper ou de presser, dans la vie quotidienne, nous utilisons nos mains comme une évidence pour toute une série de tâches. La main humaine est vraiment un merveilleux outil de la nature. Quoi de plus évident, dans les espaces de travail collaboratifs, que d’équiper un robot d’un manipulateur inspiré de ce modèle naturel et qui puisse apprendre à effectuer diverses tâches de préhension et de rotation grâce à l’intelligence artificielle ?
The digital simulation model speeds up the training considerably, especially if you multiply it. In massively parallel learning, the acquired knowledge is shared with all of the virtual hands, which then continue to work with the new state of knowledge, meaning that each error is only made once. Successful actions are immediately available to all models.
Once the control system has been trained in the simulation, it is transferred to the real BionicSoftHand. This can then use the movement strategy learned in the virtual environment to turn the object the desired way around and orient other objects accordingly in the future. Knowledge building blocks and new skills, once learned, could then also be shared with other robot hands and made available globally.
Unlike the human hand, the BionicSoftHand does not have any bones. It controls its movements via the pneumatic bellows structures in its fingers. When the chambers are filled with air, the fingers bend. If the air chambers are empty, the fingers remain stretched. The thumb and index finger are additionally equipped with a swivel module, which allows these two fingers to also be moved laterally. This gives the bionic robot hand a total of twelve degrees of freedom.
The bellows in the fingers are enclosed in a special 3D textile cover knitted from both elastic and high-strength fibres. This means that the textile can be used to exactly determine at which points the structure expands, thereby generating force, and where it is prevented from expanding.
In order to keep the amount of tubing work required for the BionicSoftHand as low as possible, the developers have specially designed a small, digitally controlled valve terminal, which is mounted directly below the hand. This means that the tubes for controlling the fingers do not have to be pulled through the entire robot arm. As a result, the BionicSoftHand can be quickly and easily connected and operated with only one tube each for supply air and exhaust air. The proportional piezo valves used enable the movements of the fingers to be precisely controlled.