Robotic Hand

Goal
To create a fully functional robotic arm, capable of picking up and moving a wide variety of objects.

Ideas
We are modeling our robotic arm on the human arm; it will have five fingers with three joints each, a wrist, a shoulder, and an elbow.

Hardware Components
We are dividing the hardware portion of the project up into a series of steps:

1. Develop fingers that are flexible enough to be easily be bent by a hobby motor, but strong enough to pick up small objects and to retain their shape.

2. Mount the fingers onto a palm and attach motors to them via a series of strings.

3. Mount the palm onto a forearm, and attach a motor at the wrist so that the palm can rotate.

4. Attach the forearm to an upper arm, and mount the entire arm on a stable base.

Arduino Interface
After building the hardware components of the arm, we want to connect the motors to an Arduino Uno microprocessor so that we can control its movements. This will probably require us to construct a motor driver circuit as an interface between the Arduino and the motors.

User Interface
We will finally develop a user input system to control the arm. This will consist of a series of five flex sensors attached to a glove and wired into the Arduino's inputs.