Building InMoov Robot for Sign Language Production

While there are many commercial humanoid robots available, majority would not satisfy the Objective 1 in that they would either have simpler hands with either fixed fingers or different type of a gripper (e.g. Atlas, Enon) or fingers that move all at the same time (e.g. Nao, Pepper). There are robots, however, that have dexterous hands (e.g. iCub), but they are expensive and have capabilities beyond the scope of this project.
We propose to build a custom robot - InMoov shown in Figure below with capabilities that are sufficient for the signing. The robot is an open-source project with all the models available for any modifications.

The ability of the robot to assume specific handshapes depends on whether the hands of the robot will be capable of assuming configurations such that resemble all or most of the handshapes of the sign language that it will be signing in. InMoov should be capable of executing about half of the handshapes out of available 63 handshapes in the British Sign Language (handshapes shown below). Mainly, the hand of the InMoov will not be able to assume configuration of handshapes, where fingers are close to each other (i.e. showing the palm with the fingers not spread in different directions). This is due the fact that the InMoov hand does not have degrees of freedom for moving its `metacarpal' bones (links) of the fingers sideways. Same applies to the handshapes, described in the HamNoSys documentation [1]