Underactuation in robotic grasping hands

Abstract

This paper presents the development of selfadaptive and reconfigurable hands which are versatile and easy to control. These hands have three fingers and each of the fingers has three phalanges. The selfadaptability of the hands is obtained using underactuation. Also, the reconfigurability of the hands is obtained by reorienting the fingers. The design of a three-degree-of-freedom (dof) underactuated finger, used in all the hands, is first intro- duced. A first hand, which has 12 dofs and 6 motors is then presented. Subsequently, by including underactuation among the fingers and coupling their orientation, a second hand with 10 dofs and 2 motors is obtained. Finally, control issues and experimental results are presented.