EAGER: An Inexpensive Tactile Fingertip for Dexterous Manipulation

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Robot hands fall short of the dexterity of human hands for several reasons. One reason is the lack of affordable high-performance contact and force sensors to provide sensation at the fingertips. This project is to develop a new inexpensive fingertip for robot hands, with the goal of enhancing their dexterity.? Specifically, the new fingertip will incorporate a consumer-grade miniature camera and a flexure mount to deliver three characteristics that are promising for enhancing dexterous manipulation: (1) a well-characterized relationship between the force applied to the fingertip and its deflection (i.e., stiffness); (2) high-resolution contact location sensing; and (3) high-resolution measurement of the forces and torques applied by the fingertip. To achieve these characteristics, the project is broken into four tasks: (1) the design and testing of a compact six-degree-of-freedom (6-dof) flexure exhibiting low hysteresis and stress relaxation, providing a consistent mapping between wrenches (forces and torques) applied to the flexure and its 6-dof displacement; ?(2) visual estimation of the 6-dof flexure displacement by the embedded camera, with a target resolution of better than 100 microns in linear displacement; (3) bench tests of flexure displacement sensing, wrench sensing, and contact location sensing, using our custom 5-dof stress-strain test robot, which provides ground-truth force sensing resolution of better than 0.01 N and motion resolution of better than 1 micron (linear) and 0.001 degrees (angular); and (4) initial validation of the utility of the sensor for dexterous manipulation in single-finger tasks.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.