Feasibility of teleoperations with multi-fingered robotic hand for safe extravehicular manipulations

Extra-Vehicular Activity (EVA) plays such a key rolethat more and more time is devoted to it in space missions. Nevertheless, EVA presents so many intrinsic critical aspects to result highly hazardous for the human operators. This is why a convenient alternative can be offered by telerobotic manipulations, with multi-fingered robotic hands working in teleoperated mode, to safely and remotely replicate the capabilities of the operator’s hands. But at present, remotely controlled robotic hands cannot provide the same dexterity of humans, so this work is intendedto experimentally evaluate their feasibility and technological limits when operator’s hand gestures are one-to-one mapped directly to a robotic hand device. In particular we demonstrated how state-of-the art sensory gloves, used to measure angles of human finger’s joints, can introduce averaged errors of 4.6 degrees in angles, and that these errors increase to 6.5 degrees when remotely replicated by standard anthropomorphic robotic hands.