Modeling and animating a synergy-based hand avatar for haptic grasping

This video shows a demo application using a technique to animate a realistic hand avatar with a 20DoF kinematic skeleton, based on the biomechanics and
anatomy of the human hand, and a deformable skin surface, suitable for real-time haptic interaction without the use of sensor gloves. The proposed approach is based on the knowledge of a sets of kinematic constraints between all the joints of the hand, referred to as postural synergies, which allow to represent the whole hand posture using a number of variables smaller than the actual number of hand joints. The proposed technique aims at evaluating such variables only capturing the motion of thumb and index tips, measured in the task space by two single-contact-point haptic devices. We developed a kinematic inversion algorithm which takes synergies into account, and which is able to evaluate the kinematic configuration of the whole hand, i.e. also of the other fingers that are not directly measured. The deformation of the hand skin is achieved using a linear vertex blending technique. The proposed synergy--based animation of the hand avatar involves only algebraic computations, with neither time-consuming procedures or solution of dynamic equations, and is very suitable for real-time haptic implementation.

References:

- S. Mulatto, A. Formaglio, M. Malvezzi, D. Prattichizzo. "Animating a deformable hand avatar with postural synergies for haptic grasping". In Haptics: Generating and Perceiving Tangible Sensations. Eurohaptics 2010, pp. 203-210, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer Verlag, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 2010.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• hand

[GiantLobsterTheRat]

Nice, I'm doing a similar thing for a group project, how did you make the avatar of the hand you're displaying?