Development of a sensory system for a mechanical linked adult finger / Warhamni Abdul Kadir

The aim of this thesis is to develop a sensory system to be modeled together with a mechanical linked adult finger prototype in order to sense the softness and hardness of a surface. The mechanical linked adult finger has a 3 Degrees-of-Freedom (DOF) with three links driven by an actuator through a pulley system designed using a Computer Aided Design (CAD) software; CATIA® v5. A working model using Stereolithography Rapid Prototyping (RP) technique was fabricated to demonstrate the working function of the finger. A servomotor was programmed to control both the flexion and extension movement for the mechanical linked adult finger using PIC16F877A microcontroller. A 0.2mm thin film Force Sensing Resistor (FSR) tactile sensor with a sensing area of 9.5mm has the ability of sensing force ranges up to HON, was placed at the tip of the prototype finger. In addition, the use of C-software; MPLAB® to write and compile the codes helped to ease the process of designing the applications for the controller. Both the servomotor and the tactile FSR sensor were successfully integrated into one controller board which was used to demonstrate the model's functionality. As a result, the flexionextension movement established from the model had almost the same range of movement to a human finger while the FSR tactile sensor on the other hand was able to give load value for an object surface in contact The model however, still requires further work and upgrading on its sensory system to enhance and improve its functionality.