UBH 3: A Biologically Inspired Robotic Hand

Abstract

This paper describes a work in progress at the Uni-versity of Bologna concerning the design of a new anthropomorphic robot hand. The overall hand is based on an innovative mechanical architecture, which adopts deformable elements as joint hinges. This de-sign leads to an endo-skeletal structure particularly suitable to host a distributed sensory equipment and a continuous compliant cover, allowing a high level of anthropomorphism together with great structural sim-plification, reliability enhancement and cost reduction. Furthermore, the proposed solution is very flexible, as it can be adapted to many different end-effector con-figurations and is not dependent on a particular type of actuation, being compatible with future availability of any kind of artificial muscles. 1