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November 2006 Calendar

CS Masters' Thesis Defense

Title: Synergetic Control of Multi Fingered Robot Hands
Speaker: Yuhui Luo
Date: Monday, November 6, 2006
Time: 11:00 a.m.
Location: GMCS 412
Thesis advisor: Dr Marko Vuskovic

Abstract:
This thesis describes the design and implementation of a computer control system of the anthropomorphic robotic hand developed in Robotics and Neural Network Laboratory at San Diego state university. The robotic hand is a new version of a human sized, five fingered artificial hand originally developed at the University of Belgrade and University of South California.

The new control system is based on Windows 2000operating system and the optimized C/C++ software that was partially developed in a previous work at SDSU. A Graphic User Interface (GUI) was developed to interface a human operator with the hand system. A Servo-To-Go Inc. ISA Bus Servo I/O card, and related software, was incorporated in the PC to serve as the interface between the high-level (software) and the low-level (hardware) components. The interface board enabled a near real-time communication with the individual motors, and the feedback encoders.

To achieve a particular grasp, two kinds of algorithms were developed: the joint-space command interface, and the Cartesian command interface. The second type of the command interface is also called synergetic control, which is based on the idea of synergetic compression/decompression of degrees of freedom. The roots of this idea start in biological synergetic theory.

Control parameters of the robot hand controller have been carefully studied and optimized. This enabled multiple fingers of the robot hand to move smoothly according to the commands sent from the GUI. With the optimized parameters, different trajectory profiles, including trapezoidal profile, quintic profile, and cycloide profile, were implemented. The experimental results have been found to be consistent with the theoretical computations.
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