Robotic Hand for Math and Tech Class-stem

We created a robot hand that can do the motion of pinching using the thumb and the pointer finger using mostly items at home or you could get very easily anywhere.

The materials that we used for this project were.

• 1 Exacto knife
• 1 Plyer
• 1 Hot glue gun
• 1 piece of Styrofoam
• 1 Ruler
• 1 Marker
• 1 Computer
• 6 colored rubber bands
• 15 paper clips
• 1 needle
• 1 wooden stick
• 1 sander
• 1 case of fishing wire
• 2 sensors
• 1 Arduino Uno
• 1 Arduino cable

The first step in our project was picking a model to mold our hand from. We assigned roles to each of our group members to accomplish each task of our project. As we moved through our project, some tasks were switched around and re-assigned to different members. Personally, I was in charge of gluing multiple rubber bands on the fingers and back of the palm of the hand, so they had tension and release. I created a rounded fastener by cutting paperclips and applying them to the hand. To finish my part in the project I completed a fully functional code for the servos.

We used the models hand to trace out all five fingers and the palm of the hand. Then using are marker and ruler we got nice clean trace marks. We used a utility knife and cut perfectly along the trace marks. The team crafted proper rectangular prisms for all five finger and then a proper squared palm.

Next, we gathered the rectangular prism measurements of the length, width and height of all of the 5 fingers to eventually be able to do our code and find out how much foam we wasted in sculpting completed fingers.

Next up, we sanded down the rectangular prisms until we formed the square palm and they resembled and functioned like proper fingers. Without sanding the fingers would not properly bend or function and the palm would be ridged and not bend.

After sanding down the finger we had to re-take the measurements (height, diameter and radius) of the new and improved finger to see how much foam we wasted and how functional the fingers would be.

We then began to cut three segments into each finger and 2 segments into the thumb representative of a hand. We needed to use a utility knife to cut the segments on a 45 degree angle While cutting the finger segments we cut one 45 degree angle in the bottom segment, two 45 degree slices in the middle and one 45 degree slice again at the top. The same process was completed for each finger and also the thumb using, one 45 degree slice on the bottom and one on the top.

After that, we tied fishing line to a needle and then sowed all the finger segments to each other starting from the bottom of the finger and feeding the line through to each segment of the finger joint and then stitched back down to double the tightness and to keep them together.

After getting all of the segments attached too each other you take the extra fishing wire attached to each of the fingers and sew them at to keep everything attached and formed not, only keep it in place but also for gripping.

In order to keep the fishing wire attached to the palm of the hand we had to first cut sections of paper clips witch we then used as staples to keep the fishing wire strait and attached very well.

To get the fingers back into place after they have been moved we used tension from stretched rubber bands to move them back into place .The steps we followed to do this were cutting the rubber bands into equal strips then we put the fingers strait and glue the rubber band pieces on to keep the tension taught.

Coding was happening throughout the physical creation but isn't required for the hand to move this code o was meant to find out the volume of the fingers. The steps we followed used math thermos to create the code and then used both the older and the newer code to put into the program to get the volume.

Our last step was to use servo motor to get the fingers to do certain actions like making a pinching motion. To bring this all together , we used the code that I made first and then we used that code to the fishing wire to get then to move together. I then had to create it by using a Arduino Uno and attached the servo motors to it finally we cut out holes in the Styrofoam hand to hold the motors.