Hidalgo is a human size humanoid robot developed by students from UPM. ManoPLA is the project focusing on the development of its hands. The main reason to keep the hand as an integrated design is to easily connect it to the humanoid robot.
All the PCBs, developed using Eagle tool, have been designed to fit in the hand structure.
17 different DC motors and 17 independent IR sensors have been incorporated within the hand and fingers in a very compact desing
The need to independently control 17 actuators and 17 sensors, means having a large amount of digital and analogic inputs, not easily found in one microcontroller. To solve this, two different solutions have been developed
The low-level programming of the microcontroller allows for a complete control of the device which is especially important when reducing the execution cycles. Such optimization makes possible the elaboration of 17 PWM independent signals by software.
Using C and C++ allows to ensure the optimization of the code since object oriented programming is the perfect way to organize the program which controls the robotic hand.
To ease the control of the hand, a computer interface has been developed. Using the keyboard it is possible to control all degrees of freedom independently, and also set the free keys with an specific movement. The comunication between devices is performed by serial port.
