Call2 Monitoring DEXDEB

Public Summary Month 1/2013

Sat, 09 Feb 2013 08:54:49 GMT

In the past extended two months, the DEXDEB research team mainly focused on the final experiments for verifying the proposed application of dexterous robot hands in deboning operation in meat industry as a scenario for manipulation and grasping of soft and deformable materials under the human-robot co-working scheme. Theoretical investigation and practical experiments were carried out by the three consortiums of the project. Grasp constraint of the metamorphic hand was investigated and kinematics and force control of the arm-hand integrated system is studied. Integrating the Shadow hand into the ABB robot arm at ADIV and the KCL metamorphic hand into the Fanuc robot arm at KCL and ABB robot arm at ADIV, a series of experiments were carried out leading to the demonstration of using dexterous robot hands in deboning operation and the finalization of the proposed experiment.

Public Summary Month 11/2012

Fri, 30 Nov 2012 22:18:04 GMT

In the past two months, a project meeting was held in IFMA during week 40 discussing the final scenario of the project. The G4 KCL Metamorphic hand has been integrated on the ABB robot at ADIV and the identification of the butcher's left hand movements with a data glove was carried out through recording of the forces measured by the glove's tactile sensors (FSR sensors) and recording of the PIP[1] and MCP[2] joints angular coordinates measured by the glove's bend sensors (Bend sensors). Definition of the Shadow hand poses to perform grasping of meat for each deboning step was proposed. And formalization of ABB robot and Shadow hand movements defined for manipulation and grasping tasks on soft and deformable materials was investigated.

Public Summary Month 9/2012

Sun, 30 Sep 2012 12:53:33 GMT

In the past two months, i.e. August and September of 2012, further to the initial experiments done at KCL, based on INSTRON® Model 5543 and the Shadow hand, several studies and experiments were performed at the IFMA and ADIV in the DEXDEB project. The five-fingered and four-fingered versions of KCL metamorphic hand have been manufactured and assembled which is ready for the experiment study and comparison investigation. A project meeting is to be held at IFMA on 2-6 October discussing the final scenarios and benchmark of robotization of deboning. Research papers on the meat grasping and deboning using the Shadow hand and the KCL metamorphic hand are in preparation and will be submitted in the coming month.

Public Summary Month 7/2012

Tue, 31 Jul 2012 15:58:57 GMT

In the past two months, i.e. June and July of 2012, based on the test rig set up at KCL, the further tests and experiments of using the left-hand Shadow hand have been carrying out and a new version of left-hand metamorphic hand has been designed and is in manufacturing in Tianjin China. An international conference, i.e. the Second ASME/IFToMM International Conference on Reconfigurable Mechanisms and Robots (ReMAR 2012) has been successfully held on 9-12th July in Tianjin China which was organized and chaired by Professor Jian S. Dai from King’s College London, Rich Walker has given a plenary presentation of the DEXDEB research at the conference. Researchers from KCL including Dr. Guowu Wei, Dr. Ketao Zhang, Dr. Helge Wurdemann and Dr. Vahid Aminzadeh joined the organization of this conference in China. Further, investigations and experiments on identification of butcher hand movements were carried out at IFMA.

Public Summary Month 5/2012

Thu, 31 May 2012 10:34:25 GMT

In the past two months, i.e. April and May of 2012, based on the test rig set up at KCL, the initial tests and experiments of using the left-hand Shadow hand have been carrying out and some initial results has been achieved. A poster on the progress of this project has been delivered to the ECHORD workshop at ICRA 2012. Further, integrated with force sensor and Kinect vision system, more experiments on manual ham deboning have been realized which will contribute to the development and further experiments to be carried out in this project. A left-hand metamorphic hand is under constructing and will be ready for initial test in the next step

Public Summary Month 3/2012

Sat, 31 Mar 2012 21:08:02 GMT

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.

Public Summary Month 1/2012

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 19:25:45 GMT

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.

Public Summary Month 11/2011

Wed, 30 Nov 2011 23:06:01 GMT

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.

Public Summary Month 9/2011

Fri, 30 Sep 2011 20:42:27 GMT

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.