A Rigid and Flexible Structures Coupled Underactuated Hand

Robotic hand has vast application potential in home-serviced, medical care, surgery, maintenance, Etc. Various robotic hands made of rigid and flexible materials have been developed in the past decade. In this work, we present a rigid-flexible coupled underactuated hand with good agility and compliance for various kinds of grasping and safe operations. First, the dynamic simulation for finger bending and underactuated hand grasping was studied. Then, a prototype of the underactuated hand was fabricated. Next, we carried out a series of experiments based on the prototype. Single finger bending performance and blocking force were tested, respectively. We also tested the adaptive grasping ability of the hand. Finally, we performed collision experiments and compared the impact forces of the Be Bionic hand and our underactuated hand. Results showed that the underactuated hand could grasp objects with different shapes and possessed a higher degree of safety, reducing impact force by 30% to 50%.