Dr. Hannes Höppner
Human hand stiffness and its transfer to robotic systems
In my presentation I will talk about stiffness of human hands and what we can learn for soft robotic hands. Especially the question whether the human hand has the ability to substantially increase stiffness apart from its coupling to force can be relevant for the design of soft robotic hands. Moreover, I will present a method to measure continuously hand stiffness and will talk about using this method to teleoperate the compliance of a robotic hand equipped with variable stiffness.
Short CV:
Dr. Hannes Höppner is Scientific Researcher at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) – Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics. He was organization chair of the “Summer School on Impedance” on Frauenchiemsee, Germany in 2011. His research interests include the development of continuous and perturbation-based methods for measuring intrinsic human stiffness characteristics, the teleoperation of it to robotic systems and the design of variable stiffness actuators for robotic arms and hands. Moreover, he focused recently on the development of a safety system for safe human-robot collaboration and won the KUKA Innovation Award 2017. He is currently principle investigator at DLR for the EU project soma.