Contact Pressure Distribution as an Evaluation Metric for Human-Robot Hand Interactions

Abstract

Soft robotic technologies are paving way for physical human-robot hand interactions, creating a need for structured evaluation metrics for robot hands. We propose that the contact pressure distribution of the grasp should be used as a hand benchmark both for naturalness and comfort, and present our initial work in this direction. We describe an experimental setup for measuring the contact pressure distribution and present a case study comparing the pressure distributions from a robotic hand and a human hand. The grasping force of the human hand is ten times greater than the robot, but the robot hand produces higher peak contact pressures and smaller contact areas.