Abstract:
Soft robot hands have shown promising results when it comes to dexterous grasping and manipulation. Compared to their rigid counterparts, soft hands can be manufactured for a fraction of the cost and offer robustness to uncertainty due to their inherent compliance. Unfortunately, the design and fabrication of soft robot hands is still a time-consuming and difficult process. In this talk, I will present some of the lessons I have learned from designing and working with soft robot hands in the past years. First, I will highlight soft hand capabilities with regard to dexterous grasping and manipulation. Then, I will discuss some of the typical fabrication techniques of mold making and casting, and compare them to additive manufacturing techniques.
Further, I will present our previous work on modeling soft hands and discuss why a FEM simulation may not always be the right choice during the design process. Finally, I will show how simplifying the unconstrained design space of soft hands using soft joints can enable the use of fast rigid-body simulation to quickly visualize design capabilities.

Committee:
Nancy Pollard
Christopher Atkeson
Wenzhen Yuan
Jacky Liang