In-Glove + Applications (SRF and Home Assistant)

The In-Glove (Intelligent Glove)

TEAM: Curt, Shruthi, Vedant

1.DESCRIPTION:

Our project is composed of three subprojects: the hand gesture / position glove and two applications for said glove.

For the first part of the final class project, we would like to make smart gloves that helps the user send remote signals using hand gestures as commands. While there are many similar kinds of gloves that exist as projects, a lot of those gloves do not make use of the wide variety of sensors available in the market. Additionally, some of the projects seemed to be made inefficiently in that they seemed to be pretty bulky for how much they can do. We want to explore how those existing gloves could be improved in not just functionality but also aesthetics. Thus, we would work on this project not as an invention, but rather a demonstration/experiment

1.1 FUNCTIONALITY:

The functionality of the glove would include things such as pressure, motion and flex sensors to capture various gestures, and associate these gesture-controlled commands to control the application sub-projects as detailed below. Communication will be handled with Bluetooth or WiFi depending on the application being implemented.

1.2 USAGE:

The typical process to use the glove will start with a user placing the glove onto their hand and performing calibration. While the details of calibration will need to be worked through as we develop the software, it will most likely take the form of the user positioning their hand into a predefined pose. Depending on the end application, we could either provide the user with a list of predefined guidelines that maps gestures to tasks or allow customization of the said mapping. In the latter case, we would have to perform experiments on the kinds of gestures that are best read and provide the user with a set of guidelines on how to make customization most efficient.

We now proceed to describe separately the idea and plan for Curt’s supernumerary robotic finger as well as Vedant and Shruthi’s Wearable home automation.

2. SUPERNUMERARY ROBOTIC FINGER

Using the glove developed as hand position input, Curt will construct a supernumerary robotic finger mounted next to the left hand pinky finger. This digit will mirror the biological thumbs location and joint structure. The robotic finger will map the hand gesture to user intention which in turn maps to a joint configuration for the finger. By the end of the term a simple hard-coded heuristic function will be developed to perform this mapping.

Curt is primarily developing this project for his own curiously. Specifically, Curt would like to wear the device for a full day to record hand position data, record failures and inconveniences, record interactions with others and their perception, and explore contexts of applicability. This in turn allows Curt to further develop a machine learning algorithm, iterative design improvements, HCI insight, and further general SRF usage taxonomy respectively.

As for the eventual end-user, this technology could potentially augment any life task however I am mostly interested in applying the technology to the manufacturing and construction spaces where the ability to do self-handovers is an important aspect of the task. An example would be screwing an object overhead while on a ladder. The constraints are that a person should keep three points of contact while holding both the object and the screwdriver. If they need to do all three, they may lean the abdomen onto the ladder which is less effective than a grasp. Instead with several robotic fingers (or a robotic limb) the object and screw driver could be effectively held/manipulated while grasping the ladder. Another example the should relate to this class is soldering where the part(s), soldering iron, and solder need to be secured. This could be overcome with an SRF thumb to feed the solder to the tip of the soldering iron while holding the parts down with one’s other hand.

In the SRF literature Curt is proposing to provide a modest incremental improvement. Wu & Asada worked with flex sensors however they were only interested in the first three fingers and did not attempt to model the hand position directly. Arivanto, Setiawan, & Arifin focused on developing a lower cost version of Wu & Asada’s work. One of Leigh’s & Maes’ work is with a Myo EMG sensor which is not included in the project. They also present work with modular robotic fingers though they never explore the communication between finger and human in that piece. Finally, Meraz, Sobajima, Aoyama, et al. focus on body schema where they remap a wearer’s existing thumb to the robotic thumb.

2.1 WEARABLE HOME AUTOMATION:

While these gloves could have many different functions, we would like to focus on using these gloves as part of a smart home, including functions like controlling the TV, smart lights, as well as a Google Home/Alexa (through a speaker). This could especially be useful for people with disabilities (scenarios where voice based communication is not easy), or even just a lazy person.

This project utilizes ideas of Computational gesture recognition to create a wearable device. We use components of sensor systems and micro controllers in conjunction with a mobile application, (preferably android) along with fundamentals of circuit design. Our project management technique would involve a mix of waterfall and iterative models, keeping in mind the timeline available so as to create a viable solution to home automation.

The idea is to have the glove communicate to an android application either via bluetooth or a wifi module, and the phone in turn can control several other devices. Since applications like the Google assistants have powerful AI technology integrated into them, can we extend those capabilities from a beyond the phone on to a wearable fabric?

Also, it brings in the concept of a portable google home of sorts. This means that we do not need to install a google home in every room. This project is meant to be pragmatic and the consumer is the general population. It could also be of extra help to people with disabilities.

3.INSPIRATION

SRF takes inspiration from Wu & Asada (along with other work in flex sensors as to detect finger movement), Meraz, Sobajima, Aoyama, et al. will provide inspiration of using a thumb as the digit being added, and Leigh’s & Maes’ work in modular fingers will be the inspiration for how Curt constructs the wrist connection. The novelty is bringing these pieces together to form a wearable that one can run a long-term usability test.

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6629884

http://maestroglove.com/

SRF:

[1] F. Y. Wu and H. H. Asada
[2] M. Ariyanto, R. Ismail, J. D. Setiawan and Z. Arifin
[3] Sang-won Leigh and Pattie Maes
[4] S. Leigh, H. Agrawal and P. Maes
[5] F. Y. Wu and H. H. Asada
[6] Segura Meraz, N., Sobajima, M., Aoyama, T. et al.

We find significant work done in the general area of gesture recognition using a glove. However, those gesture interpretations have been applied in different domains. We did find a project or two where gloves where used for home automation. However, the choice of sensors is different from what we plan to use. (flex and pressure).

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/48d1/f42a04c14eaac14f0339666d610309a3ff58.pdf

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/5573128

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7931887

4.SKETCHES

How will the final product look like?

The following sketches were developed for the project pitch and compiled here due to their similarity. The important aspects to note with the glove is the presence of flex sensors used to capture finger movement, touch sensors on the fingertips, and an inertial measurement unit to capture hand orientation.

Glove:

SRF:

5. MATERIALS

Electronics:

Microcontroller (w/ Bluetooth and WiFi ex. ESP32, Adafruit Flora, Particle Photon, Arduino, Possibly external Bluetooth or WiFi Module)
Flex sensors
Resistive pressure/force sensors
Vibration motor
IMU (Gyroscope, accelerometer)
Micro servos (For SRF)
Infrared LED emitter / receiver

Clothing / Physical Materials:

Glove
Wrist brace (For SRF)
3D printed components (case, mounting)

6.SKILLSET LIST:

Curt:

I come into this project with experience soldering, designing circuits, and programming. My talent is mainly in embedded system programing with C. I will need to master sewing and other soft materials skills and knowledge to hack a glove in an aesthetically pleasing fashion. Another skill hurdle will be 3D printing as I have some familiarity during undergrad where I worked with a 3D printer as a hobbyist but never formally trained. Finally, I will need to further hone my project management skills due to the ambitious scope as laid out.

Vedant:

While I have some experience with programming, this project would require a lot of microcontroller programming, so that would be the main thing I would have to master. The project would also require some knowledge of IoT so I would be looking more into that as well.

Additionally, I have experience using tools in the makerspace (3d printing, laser cutting), so if I have time to focus on the aesthetics, I could use those skills to help me improve the looks. However, it is a given that I will also have to learn soldering well to compact the design, as well as sewing to make the glove look nice.

Shruthi:

I have prior experience with arduino programming. I have a decent understanding of C and Python programming. Also, I can contribute in integrating the sensory data to a mobile application. I am more comfortable debugging on an IDE and not so much directly on a hardware device and I need to improve my skillset in this direction.I could also help with the aestheic aspect of the glove in sewing and stitching. However, I do not have significant experience in these areas.

7.TIMELINE

7.1 MILESTONE 1

Technology shown to work (March 25)

Glove
- Glove w/ all flex sensors
- Position of hand captured, data transmitted to PC/phone for processing / visualization
- IMU captures absolute orientation, data transmitted to PC/phone for processing / visualization
- Power supply and integration started
SRF
- Robotic finger 3D printed
Assistant
- Test whether the bluetooth or wifi module would work best to connect to the Google Assistant
- Look into Google assistant API and see what functions/commands can be given using a third part app

7.2 MILESTONE 2

Technology works in wearable configuration (April 8)

Note after this point, project focus splits from being glove focused to application focused. Curt will take on SRF subproject and Shruthi & Vedant will take on the home assistant subproject.

Glove
- Refinement of aesthetics
- Power supply and integration complete
SRF
- Robotic finger controlled
- Brace developed
Assistant
- Basic functioning app developed
- Required IR codes and assistant commands obtained

7.3 MILESTONE 3

Technology and final wearable fully integrated (April 22)

Glove
- Error reduction, final iteration on design
SRF
- If time allows a one person “user study” to capture longer term data
- Else refinement of the finger control / design
Assistant
- Fully functioning app that receives commands from gloves and sends commands to Google Assistant app to control smart home
- Aesthetic gloves that house the electronics, battery and sensors ergonomically

8. FALLBACK PLAN

Glove:

We will be starting with an experiment with one finger to see if one flex sensor is sufficient to capture the gesture information necessary. The answer found may show that one flex sensor is sufficient for the assistant subproject but not the SRF project. Alternatively it could be that flex sensors themselves are not sufficient. To that end, this experiment will be done early in order to integrate the findings into our design.

The minimum that we will consider success is a glove that can output preprogrammed gesture commands that are loosely coupled to the state of the fingers. For example curling the index finger will be a command.

SRF:

Curt will have to learn more about 3D printing to develop the SRF physical components. Additionally, a mounting system needs to be developed. Depending on how time consuming this step is, Curt may need to develop a simple, proof of concept, heuristic for the final demonstration. This could result in non-ideal finger movement that does not track the intent of the wearer, however failure of the algorithm in some cases will be deemed acceptable as this is still an open research area.

Assistant:

We will also integrate the sensor signal data and manage to establish communication to a phone via either bluetooth or wifi. We would probably begin by controlling a smart light or a single device and eventually try to build larger integration with the Google home app. We would first develop a prototype, a rather simple proof of concept and try to get a single instance of end to end communication channel functional. However, since this is still in experimental stages, we cannot guarantee the accuracy and reliability of its function.

February 18, 2019

Michael Leykin: Initial Project Pitch

Name: Michael Leykin

Idea#1: Defense

The 3-factor Bluetooth authentication bracelet!

Sketch:

Purpose: Add additional layers of security to any physical device.

Project is meant to be a pragmatic solution for companies with large number of workstations.

How It Would Work: After application is installed on machine, the Bluetooth bracelet would calibrate to identify you, then from then on, you would have to have the bracelet on when logging into your machine.

Confident Skills: Programming, security knowledge.

Not Confident Skills: Product design, hardware design, electrical engineering and bio metric sensors.

Idea#2: Offense

Penetration of

Endpoints and

Networks

Infiltration

System

Sketch:

Purpose: To perform a vulnerability assessment on a physical location/organization.

This project is not pragmatic at all, the only legitimate use for such a project would be for malicious purposes, so this is mainly experimental and playful.

Again, the only people I could see using this would be a malicious actor or a very dedicated security team.

How it would work: The wearer of this jacket could use a multitude of the pen testing tools present in this jacket to gain a variety of information to send back to your home machine (password hashes, metadata from workstations…etc).

Confident Skills: Programming, Pen testing tool knowledge.

Non-confident Skills: Component integration into a garment, sewing.

February 17, 2019

My idea for a wearable tech project is a mobile game with a wearable component and plushies. The intent of this project is to create a game with wearable tech with dirt-cheap wearable tech components that can be given away practically for free.

The main summary of the game is that users find and collect animals in their game by going to locations with the plushies and scanning their pendants against the plushie’s body to unlock that animal in their game.

This idea can be broken down into 3 components, each of which is considered a milestone:

The Mobile App
1. The game itself will be free-to-download and will not require any wearable tech (although, most of the fun comes in owning the subsequent wearable tech products). The game features the user having a collection of pets which they send on missions throughout the day. Each mission lasts a few hours, the player receives updates on what their pet is doing (“playing in a puddle, swinging across a rickity bridge, etc.), and once the pet completes their mission they earn some experience points and some small in-game reward (an apple, a trinket, etc.).
The Animal Pendants
1. Animal Pendants are wearable components of the game. Each pendant holds within it an RFID/NFC tag which contains a unique scannable number associated with its owner. The pendant is used to collect more animals. Because the hardware within the pendant is cheap ($1-2), small (around 1cm), and flexible, pendants can resemble anything ranging from necklaces to earrings to clip-on gadgets. Animal pendants are mainly stylized based on the animal designs and symbols created for the game.
The Animal Plushies
1. The animal plushies are stuffed animals that resemble animals that can be found in the game. Each of these animals has a RaspberryPI 0 W, an RFID/NFC reader/writer, and a battery within it. When a player scans their pendant against a plushie, they receive that animal in their game and can use that animal for adventuring in the gameplay. Each animal plushie costs around $15 in hardware (excluding cost of fabric/stuffing), and the intent is to market these towards small businesses, museums, libraries and other areas to draw in crowds.

Below are some mockups for the game’s UI and some ideas for the plushie designs. The two plushie ideas that people seemed to really like were a Sheep and an Otter, although close runner-ups were a Corgi and “A Loaf Of Cat”

I feel fairly confident in building the mobile app, and feel as though the hardware components will be rather easy to setup once I have one working model.

I feel like I could use some improvement in setting up the networking aspect of this, as well as the plushie designs.

February 17, 2019

SRF Glove

Final Project

Author: Curt Henrichs

I propose to make a supernumerary robotic finger (SRF) with position detection glove. This will consist of a robotic thumb mounted near the pinky, mirroring the biological thumbs location and movement. This thumb will be constructed with 3D printed mounting brackets and high torque micro servos. The thumb will be mounted to a modified wrist guard as used in skateboarding in order to distribute the weight of the thumb onto the wrist. The wrist guard must not impede normal hand function. Finally, there will be a series of flex sensors mounted onto a glove to detect the joint state of the wearer’s fingers. This along with an inertial measurement unit will report the hand pose information to an algorithm to control the SRF. For this project the algorithm will be constrained to a simple hard-coded heuristic approach, but future work will use data driven AI to learn the wearer’s intent off their hand position.

Target Audience

I am primarily developing this project for my own curiously. Specifically, I would like to wear the device for a full day to record hand position data, record failures and inconveniences, record interactions with others and their perception, and explore contexts of applicability. This in turn allows me to further develop a machine learning algorithm, iterative design improvements, HCI insight, and further general SRF usage taxonomy respectively.

My Motivation

Academically I am motivated by the research opportunities in the space. There are many unanswered questions as this technology has not been popularized yet. Though my interest stems from the philosophy that I adhere to, that being humans are not the end state of evolution. I am excited to construct technology that not only affects my physical appearance but my physical capacities.

Inspiration and Novel Proposal

As far as I am aware in the SRF literature I am providing a modest incremental improvement. Wu & Asada worked with flex sensors however they were only interested in the first three fingers and did not attempt to model the hand position directly [1,5]. Arivanto, Setiawan, & Arifin focused on developing a lower cost version of Wu & Asada’s work [2]. One of Leigh’s & Maes’ work is with a Myo EMG sensor which is not included in the project [3]. They also present work with modular robotic fingers though they never explore the communication between finger and human in that piece [4]. Finally, Meraz, Sobajima, Aoyama, et al. focus on body schema where they remap a wearer’s existing thumb to the robotic thumb [6].

My project will take inspiration from Wu & Asada (along with other work in flex sensors as to detect finger movement), Meraz, Sobajima, Aoyama, et al. will provide inspiration of using a thumb as the digit being added, and Leigh’s & Maes’ work in modular fingers will be the inspiration for how I construct the wrist connection. The novelty is bringing these pieces together to form a wearable that I can run a long-term usability test with myself as the subject.

Figure 1: Supernumerary robotic fingers found in literature.

Design

Figure 2 displays my thoughts on how the glove will be laid out. My first experiment will be whether one flex sensor is sufficient to capture the joint position for a finger. The position of the IMU is mounted on the glove instead of the wrist in order to capture more accurate absolute orientation of the fingers. Figure 3 shows the mounting location of the finger along with sketches of the robotic finger itself. This is inspired off of Wu & Asada’s work though I am going to building one with micro-servos instead of standard scale. These sketches are subject to change as I construct the glove.

Figure 2: Glove sketch with alternate approaches.

Figure 3: Robotic finger sketch (top) fusion 3D image, (bottom) top and bottom view of finger mounting position.

Materials

Electronics
- ESP32 – Microcontroller w/ Bluetooth and Wi-Fi
- Flex sensors
- Micro servo motors
- Resistive pressure sensor
- Vibration motor
- IMU

Clothing
- Glove (Light weight, breathable)
- Snowboarding / skateboarding arm brace

My Skills

Have experience in:
- Soldering
- Circuit design
- Programming

Need to master:
- Sewing / other soft materials knowledge and skills
- Project management
- 3D printing

Timeline

Milestone 0 – Initial Prototype (February 24)
- Glove w/ several flex sensors.
- Determine either approach 1 or 2
- Detect both span between fingers and flex of a finger
- Power supply not a concern

Milestone 1 – Technology shown to work (March 16)
- Glove w/ flex sensors
- Position of hand captured, data transmitted to PC for processing / visualization
- IMU captures absolute orientation, data transmitted to PC for processing / visualization
- Power supply and integration started
- (If time) Robotic finger 3D printed

Milestone 2 – Technology works in wearable configuration (April 6)
- Full integration
- Glove w/ all flex sensors, IMU mounted
- Wrist-brace w/ finger mounting, processor mounting
- Power supply complete
- (If time) Robotic finger controlled

Milestone 3 – Technology and final wearable fully integrated (April 20)
- (If time) “user” study

Potential Challenges

First major challenge that I have accounted for is that one flex sensor may not be enough to determine the joint state of a finger. Thus, as I will outline later, my first experiment is to see if this is the case. The next is that I do not have time to develop all components. This would be the worst case but if it does happen, I believe that I will prioritize the sensor glove before the fingers. While I have to learn more about 3D printing, I am also not a novice so given access and time I should be able to print out several parts for a robotic finger. Finally, the algorithm to convert from pose to finger position will most likely be a simple heuristic based on gesture. This could mean inadvertent triggering of a movement even if this was not the intent. While a failure of the algorithm, I am least concerned with this aspect for the term.

First Step

I have already purchased (though as of writing this still in shipping) the parts I need for my first hardware experiment. I need to figure out whether I can determine which of three finger joints is bending using one 4.5” flex sensor. If this is successful, then I will use 5 of these to capture pose information. Otherwise I will need to purchase 10 2” flex sensors to detect the finger position in one direction. As for the spread between fingers, I plan on using 1” flex sensors but for the initial prototype 2” flex sensors will work. I also plan on using an IMU to determine absolute orientation with respect to the Earth. All of this will be mounted on a relatively thin winter glove that I have purchased.

I will need to sew on the flex sensors for the one finger and one spread sense along with some mounting for the IMU. This will be connected to an Arduino Uno clone that I have to report the data back to my PC for visualization. The most challenging portion of this prototype is developing the code to determine position followed by with visualizing the hand state.

Inspiration References

[1] F. Y. Wu and H. H. Asada, Implicit and Intuitive Grasp Posture Control for Wearable Robotic Fingers: A Data-Driven Method Using Partial Least Squares, IEEE Transactions on Robotics, vol. 32, no. 1, pp. 176-186, Feb. 2016.
doi: 10.1109/TRO.2015.2506731
[2] M. Ariyanto, R. Ismail, J. D. Setiawan and Z. Arifin, Development of low cost supernumerary robotic fingers as an assistive device, 2017 4th International Conference on Electrical Engineering, Computer Science and Informatics (EECSI), Yogyakarta, 2017, pp. 1-6. doi: 10.1109/EECSI.2017.8239172
[3] Sang-won Leigh and Pattie Maes. 2016. Body Integrated Programmable Joints Interface. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’16). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 6053-6057. DOI: 10.1145/2858036.2858538
[4] S. Leigh, H. Agrawal and P. Maes, Robotic Symbionts: Interweaving Human and Machine Actions, IEEE Pervasive Computing, vol. 17, no. 2, pp. 34-43, Apr.-Jun. 2018. doi: 10.1109/MPRV.2018.022511241
[5] F. Y. Wu and H. H. Asada, “Hold-and-manipulate” with a single hand being assisted by wearable extra fingers, 2015 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Seattle, WA, 2015, pp. 6205-6212. doi: 10.1109/ICRA.2015.7140070
[6] Segura Meraz, N., Sobajima, M., Aoyama, T. et al. Modification of body schema by use of extra robotic thumb, Robomech J (2018) 5: 3. doi: 10.1186/s40648-018-0100-3