Development of 7-DOF three-fingered robotic hand for industrial work

Abstract

The purpose of this project is to design and construct a seven degree of freedom (DOF) three-fingered robotic hand. This project is the continuity from a previous work which has successfully constructed two-DOF robotic finger. In this work, a palm that holds all the three fingers is designed and the design of the current finger is improved. All components are fabricated and assembled to produce a complete robotic hand. SolidWorks software is used to design the palm and finger which considers the selection of motor, spur gears, and appropriate shape of palm. The range of motion is visualized to confirm the design with the desired application. Then, the motion of the proposed hand design is validated based on a control study which is carried out in separate work using Motion Manager Application. It can be observed from the experimental results that the robotic hand is capable of moving according to the proposed mechanism and the desired positions before successfully grasped two types of household objects with all its three fingers. This also proved that the proposed designs worked well for the task assigned by user. Thus, the resulted robotic hand can be potentially applied as the end effectors of an industrial robot for product manipulation in near future.