Personalized Voice Activated Grasping System for a Robotic Exoskeleton Glove

Controlling an exoskeleton glove with a highly efficient human-machine interface (HMI), while accurately applying force to each joint remains a hot topic. This paper proposes a fast, secure, accurate, and portable solution to control an exoskeleton glove. This state of the art solution includes both hardware and software components. The exoskeleton glove uses a modified serial elastic actuator (SEA) to achieve accurate force sensing. A portable electronic system is designed based on the SEA to allow force measurement, force application, slip detection, cloud computing, and a power supply to provide over 2 hours of continuous usage. A voice-control-based HMI referred to as the integrated trigger-word configurable voice activation and speaker verification system (CVASV), is integrated into a robotic exoskeleton glove to perform high-level control. The CVASV HMI is designed for embedded systems with limited computing power to perform voice-activation and voice-verification simultaneously. The system uses MobileNet as the feature extractor to reduce computational cost. The HMI is tuned to allow better performance in grasping daily objects. This study focuses on applying the CVASV HMI to the exoskeleton glove to perform a stable grasp with force-control and slip-detection using SEA based exoskeleton glove. This research found that using MobileNet as the speaker verification neural network can increase the speed of processing while maintaining similar verification accuracy.