Image Sensor in Every Finger

Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany, publishes a paper "A Soft Humanoid Hand with In-Finger Visual Perception" by Felix Hundhausen, Julia Starke, and Tamim Asfour.

"We present a novel underactued humanoid five finger soft hand, the KIT softhand, which is equipped with cameras in the fingertips and integrates a high performance embedded system for visual processing and control. For efficient on-board parallel processing of visual data from the cameras in each fingertip, we present a hybrid embedded architecture consisting of a field programmable logic array (FPGA) and a microcontroller that allows the realization of visual object segmentation based on convolutional neural networks. Finally, we evaluate the accuracy of visual object segmentation during the different phases of the grasping process using five different objects. Hereby, an accuracy above 90 % can be achieved."