High-Degree-of-Freedom Fabric-Based Soft Glove with Dexterous Thumb Assistance.

Abstract

Fabric-based soft gloves, due to their safety, light weight, and compliance, exhibit promising potential in assisting individuals with hand impairments. However, most existing soft gloves focus solely on finger flexion and extension, with limited consideration for thumb assistance. This restricts their effectiveness in tasks requiring extensive workspace and dexterous manipulation. In this work, we present a new class of fabric-based soft glove with 15 degrees of freedom (DOFs), including finger flexion/extension, thumb abduction/adduction, thumb opposition/reposition, and finger abduction. The high-DOF fabric-based soft glove integrates bidirectional fabric-based pneumatic actuators (FPAs) for finger flexion/extension, X-crossing pneumatic artificial muscles (X-PAMs) for thumb assistance, and Y-shaped bladed FPAs for finger abduction. To enhance the thumb tip workspace, we optimize the X-PAM positioning by modeling thumb kinematics from an anatomical perspective. The experimental results show that the optimized passive workspace of the thumb, assisted by the glove, encompasses approximately 70% of its active workspace. Through our mirror control system, we further demonstrate the glove's capability to perform complex gestures and versatile grasping tasks with various object geometries, sizes (0.1-11.5 cm), and masses (1.7-500.0 g). The glove supports both power and precision grasps, as well as fine manipulations.