[Mazvydas] shares with us, his cheap robot hand. He was inspired by this project, where someone used an Arduino and a glove with some flex sensors to control a pre-made hand. He wanted to go a little more DIY though. He chose a picaxe microcontroller and constructed the hand himself out of twine, some plexi-glass, and some rubber hose. He does ultimately plan on adding glove control as well.
Unfortunately there’s no schematic or source code. Maybe if we ask really nicely he’ll share.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2tXNkszbpM]
[via Makezine]
cleaver!
Male equivalent to the dildo?
This is an old design — I saw variants on this in both _The Robot Builder’s Bonanza_ (second edition, though it probably was in the original as well) and in the excellent _Robots, Androids, and Automatons_. It seems both established and popular, but I’m surprised it has yet to make it into hack-a-day (until now, of course).
Maybe this should be filed under ‘classic hacks’?
NB: Yes, this is cheap and easy — but the limit to the amount of force you can put out is whatever is lowest, between the tensile strength of the twine, the compressive strength of the tubing, and the actual force of the motors.
I have seen some variants that use segmented tubing in order to better mimic the segmentation of fingers, though extra motors are needed to gain the same degrees of freedom held by those segments (not to mention some trickier programming). There are also variants that separate the thumb out onto a separate board, which can be rotated on the yaw and rotated closer to or further away from the main body of the hand, better mimicing the abilities of the human hand and giving the manipulator opposable fingers — pretty important if you want it to be functional rather than just pretty!
nice!
Yeah nice cheap solution
Reminds me a lot about a project I did a while back :)
http://www.instructables.com/id/Simple-Animatronics-robotic-hand/
One of our guys at Make, Hack, Void is building a polymorph robotic hand – it currently has 3 fingers and a thumb is planned.
Project page:
http://www.makehackvoid.com/member-projects/arduino-controlled-robotic-hand
A more recent photo:
http://bobbycerini.wordpress.com/2010/09/10/small-things-how-to-make-a-robot-hand/
Schematic? It’s an arduino + 5 servos. Not criticising – in fact I’m a fan of the simplicity. The rubber hose fingers are a nice touch.
@smoker_dave “I’ve got hose, I’ve got hose, in different area codes, area codes I’ve got hose!!!
nice!! now you can build an army of them and then can start to build themselfs and take over the world hahahaaaha!! (cue the dark music)
Thanks for posting. I was really shocked, that something I have done can be posted on hackaday.
If you want the code I can provide it, but, at the moment, it is just servo movements and nothing else, so I don’t think anyone would find anything useful there.
And for schematics I would not really know what to post. As it was said, it is only microcontroller connected to 5 servos. That’s it.
If you have any questions concerning this robot hand, I would be more than happy to answer any of them. ;)
Hi. Im interested with this. I would like to know what are the materials needed. In your videos, there are some kind of pin that attached the string to the pipe. Also, the top part of the pipe is hollow? Kindly email me back. Thank you.