Mechanism design of a new multifingered robot hand

Abstract

A new five-finger robot hand (NTU hand) with seventeen degrees of freedom (DOF) is developed in this paper. In contrast to traditional tendon-driven robot, the NTU hand has an uncoupled configuration such that each finger and joint are all individually driven. While all actuators, mechanical parts and sensors are packed on the hand, the size of NTU hand is almost the same as a human hand. Such compact design makes the hand easily adapt to industrial robot arms and prosthetic applications. According to the mechanical structure of the NTU hand, the direct and inverse kinematics are also developed in this paper.