Design and Development of an Anthropomorphic Robotic Hand Using TPU Material

Abstract

The paper presented here approaches to solve the complexity of an anthropomorphic robotic hand. Robotics is now the most advancing field and there has always been an intention of mimicking human-like actuation and behavior. An anthropomorphic hand is one of the approaches to imitate human-like operations. In this paper, the idea of developing an anthropomorphic hand with 15 degrees of freedom and 5 actuators has been elaborated as well as the mechanical design, control system, composition, and peculiarities of the robotic hand have been discussed. The hand has an anthropomorphic appearance and also can perform human-like functionalities, for example, gripping and hand gestures representation. The results reveal that the hand is designed as one part and does not need any kind of assembly and it exhibits an excellent weight lifting capacity, since it is made of flexible thermoplastic polyurethane (TPU) material, and its elasticity also ensures that the hand is safe for interacting with humans as well. This hand may be used in a humanoid robot as well as a prosthetic hand. The limited number of actuators makes the control simpler and the hand lighter.