I’m back with another update to my senior design. Check it out below:

If you’ll excuse the suspicious lack of a thumb*, it’s coming together rather nicely. There are still a few kinks to work out. Motors are mounted onto the upper arm, and those pull drawstrings attached to the fingers in order to get the fingers to move. We manged to burn one out by stressing it too much, so we might have to upgrade them. I’m a little apprehensive about doing that because I don’t want to put any more weight on the arm, and more weight usually comes from better equipment. But we’ll see. And it’s tricky finding a configuration for the motors on the limited space provided so that the motors don’t interfere with one another’s operation. Oh, and it’s so much fun to play with! What’s NOT shown that we got working shortly after is that it rotates about the wrist, too! Using an accelerometer that’s mounted on the glove as well, we are able to detect the tilt off axis when the hand is roughly horizontal, and use that as the motor reference.

So this is roughly the other half of the equation, our glove/hand combo. In my last post there is a video of the rest of the arm working(ish):

As soon as the kinks are worked out with the hand, the next step will be to operate the two parts in unison. Then we can move onto the testing phase to make it demo-ready.