Design and Implementation of Dexterous Hand Master Glove to Control the Movements of a Virtual Slave Hand

Dexterous Hand Master (DHM) is one of exoskeletal controlling devices used to measure the positions of an operator’s hand, and utilize these positions to control the motion of a remote manipulator or slave. A simplified kinematics model of a human hand was developed to meet the ability of a proposed DHM glove. Only flexion/extension movements for fingers joints were taken into consideration in the designed model. An electrical circuit was designed and connected for interfacing the DHM glove with the PC. The proposed DHM was used to control the movements of a virtual slave hand, which was a computer generated image for the right human hand using Visual Basic v.6 The implemented DHM characterized by using potentiometer as bend sensors, mounted on the dorsal side of exoskeleton structure enabling a full hand closing but restricted used with a variety of hand size. It allows a wide number of different hand postures, provides a total of 10 DOF (Degree of Freedom) obtained from the ten sensors attached on the glove (2 DOF for five fingers including the thumb). The weight of the proposed DHM exoskeleton structure was approximately 130g. Glove’s connecting wires had a 1.5m length, providing a large work space for the user's arm. Index Terms — Dexterous Hand Master (DHM), flexion/extension movements, interfacing circuit, kinematics model for the human hand.