Mechatronic design of an integrated robotic hand

Abstract

Historically, robotic hand research has tended to focus on two areas: severely underactuated hands, and high-degree-of-freedom fully actuated hands. Comparatively little research has been done in between those spaces. Furthermore, despite the large number of robotic hand designs that have been proposed in the past few decades, very few robot hands are available for purchase on the commercial market. In this paper, we present a hand designed for minimalistic dexterous manipulation, in which every stage of the design process also considered its manufacturing cost. We discuss the various trade-offs made in the design. Finally, we present the results of experiments in which the robotic hand was affixed to a manipulator arm and teleoperated to grasp and manipulate a variety of objects.