Project MADI

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Project:

Semiautonomous and Teleoperated Dextrous Manipulation for Industrial and Service Robotics

( MaDi )

TITLE: Semiautonomous and Teleoperated Dextrous Manipulation for Industrial and Service Robotics

REFERENCE: CICYT DPI2001-2202

PERIOD: 2001-2004

PROJECT LEADER: Raúl Suárez Feijóo

E-mail: raul.suarez@upc.es
Phone: +34-934016548/6654

CENTER: Institut de Organització i Control de Sistemes Industrials (IOC)
Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC)

KEYWORDS: robotics, grasping, manipulation, dexterous mechanical hands, versatile grippers, teleoperation

Robot end-effectors specially designed for particular applications have reached a high degree of development and sophistication and are quite common in the robotics world. Nevertheless, their operating flexibility is still limited, which motivates the search for more versatile tools. In this context, the human hand is the clearest paradigm of high operating flexibility tool that, besides the grasping capability, has a high manipulation capability of objects with a wide range of shapes and sizes. Then, it is natural the proposal of developments of mechanical devices imitating the human hand performance.

This project is focused towards the creation of a high versatility tool for industrial and service robotics, a tool with the capability of performing, in a semiautomatic way, grasping and manipulation of different objects within a range of shape and size equivalent to those that the human hand can manipulate. The use of this tool in assisted teleoperation is considered as an application of particular relevance, obtaining in this way a remote controlled device with capabilities equivalent to the human hand that can help in the execution of remote actions in places of difficult or not recommended access.

The goal of the project follows the existing tendency to the search for versatile end-effectors that can be used in non-structured environments (i.e. when a model is not available a priori) and avoid the need for a set of different tools that have to be changed during a task execution. In this project it will be considered as experimental set-up the mechanical hand developed at the IOC within a previous CICYT project. The wide range of potential applications, both in industrial and service robotics, makes that the developments proposed in this project could mean a significant step in the advance toward the next generation of high versatility devices with anthropomorphic features.

Poster with a Project Summary (PDF)

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