In the last two months, i.e. February and March of 2012, concrete progress has been achieved for the DEXDEB team, the left hand Shadow hand has been delivered to KCL integrating to a FANUC robot arm at KCL, expect for Shadow itself, two of the team members attended the Workshop on HANDLE training at Benicassim (Spain) in February and the DEXDEB ROS workshop was held at King’s College London in March. A paper on the friction compensation and control strategy for the dexterous robotic hands has been accepted for publication by the Second ASME/IEEE International Conference Reconfigurable Mechanisms and Robots.

According to the revised DoW, the DEXDEB research team was making concrete progress towards the aim and objectives of the proposed project. Trajectory planning is under development and both KCL Metamorphic hand and Shadow hand are under constructing.

In this past two months, DEXDEB was carrying out the trajectory analysis and progressing on the concept of mapping human hand trajectory to the joint space and workspace of the robotic hand. The investigation on the possibility of using a foam model to replace meat for the experiments is in a preliminary test. The left-hand robotic hand was currently under design and manufacturing. Good progress was made from the DEXDEB team.

This proposal is to carry out the application study in experiment of using dexterous robot hands for deboning operation which is laborious and less safe for human operators as a pioneering study of establishing a hyper-flexible work cell for cutting, deboning and muscle extraction operation in meat industry.

The proposed experiment for the first time proposes using robotic hands in deboning operations particularly in replacing the current dangerous and laborious use of left hand of a human operator. The robotic hand is used in the experiment to grasp and handle meat in a number of different ways for grasping, pushing, pulling and twisting in order to expose the hidden bone for the cutter to go through. This dexterous manipulation is to be implemented by dexterous and articulated robot hands recently developed to benchmark the hand and to generate recommendation for the meat industry in robotic hand manipulation for deboning.

The proposal presents the in-depth study of manipulation trajectories in deboning particularly in the left hand operation to present the dexterous motion generated by the experienced human operator. This study helps implement hand operation and provides new presentation of workspace by establishing the task to be mapped into the hand joint space and associated to the workspace.

The experiment hence provides the study of grasping and handling meat as soft and deformable objects and demonstrates the robot hand in manipulating meat in cooperating with a human operator, constituting proof-of-concept of using robot hands for deboning and presenting an initial step for setting up a hyper-flexible cell for deboning. This contributes to both industrialist in meat handling and grasping and to academics in trajectory planning and cooperative manipulation using a multifingered robotic hand with the cross-disciplinary background of the consortium.