Towards Very Low-Cost Iterative Prototyping for Fully Printable Dexterous Soft Robotic Hands

The design and fabrication of soft robot hands is still a time-consuming and difficult process. Advances in rapid prototyping have accelerated the fabrication process significantly while introducing new complexities into the design process. In this work, we present an approach that utilizes novel low-cost fabrication techniques in conjunction with design tools helping soft hand designers to systematically take advantage of multi-material 3D printing to create dexterous soft robotic hands. While very low cost and lightweight, we show that generated designs are highly durable, surprisingly strong, and capable of dexterous grasping.

Contact Transfer: A Direct, User-Driven Method for Human to Robot Transfer of Grasps and Manipulations

We present a novel method for the direct transfer of grasps and manipulations between objects and hands through utilization of contact areas. Our method fully preserves contact shapes, and in contrast to existing techniques, is not dependent on grasp families, requires no model training or grasp sampling, makes no assumptions about manipulator morphology or kinematics, and allows user control over both transfer parameters and solution optimization. Despite these accommodations, we show that our method is capable of synthesizing kinematically feasible whole hand poses in seconds even for poor initializations or hard to reach contacts. We additionally highlight the method's benefits in both response to design alterations as well as fast approximation over in-hand manipulation sequences. Finally, we demonstrate a solution generated by our method on a physical, custom designed prosthetic hand.