A Lobster-inspired Robotic Glove for Hand Rehabilitation

This paper presents preliminary results of the design, development, and evaluation of a hand rehabilitation glove fabricated using lobster-inspired hybrid design with rigid and soft components for actuation. Inspired by the bending abdomen of lobsters, hybrid actuators are built with serially jointed rigid shells actuated by pressurized soft chambers inside to generate bending motions. Such bio-inspiration absorbs features from the classical rigid-bodied robotics with precisely-defined motion generation, as well as the emerging soft robotics with light-weight, physically safe, and adaptive actuation. The fabrication procedure is described, followed by experiments to mechanically characterize these actuators. Finally, an open-palm glove design integrated with these hybrid actuators is presented for a qualitative case study. A hand rehabilitation system is developed by learning patterns of the sEMG signals from the user's forearm to train the assistive glove for hand rehabilitation exercises.