Imitation and learning of human hand gesture tasks of the 3D printed robotic hand by using artificial neural networks

In this study social learning and skill acquisition of a robotic hand via teaching and imitation was aimed. The subject of Human-Robot collaboration, which includes the theme of this paper, is a common field of experiments in our age of technology. Many disabilities can be defeated or many other things, which a human being would not be able to do, can be done with the help of this technology. As an example, a robotic hand can be a light of hope of a person who does not have a hand or wants to hold an object remotely over the internet. So that in our paper it is explained how a robotic hand can learn via imitation. In the experiment a robotic hand, which was printed by a 3D printer, was used and controlled wirelessly by a computer that recognizes human hand gesture via image processing algorithms. The communication between the computer and the robot is provided with a Bluetooth module. First of all, the image processing algorithms such as filtering and background subtraction were applied to the frames of the camera and extracted the features. Secondly, the process of teaching and testing of Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) was made for the recognition of the hand and the gestures. After that, recognized actions were imitated by the robotic-hand hardware. Eventually, the learning of the robot via imitation was achieved with some small errors and the results are given at the end of the paper.