BCL-13: A 13-DOF Soft Robotic Hand for Dexterous Grasping and In-Hand Manipulation

This letter presents a dexterous soft robotic hand, BCL-13, with 4 fingers and 13 independently actuated joints capable of in-hand manipulation. The iconic dexterity is enabled by a novel soft robotic finger design with three degrees of freedom (DOFs), significantly improving over existing soft actuator dexterity and realizing human-finger-like workspace. The palm is also equipped with a dedicated rotational DOF to enable opposition of fingers. Investigations on human hand model reduction, in-hand manipulation principles, as well as the fabrication procedures of the soft robotic fingers and hand were presented in detail. Dedicated experiments using the fabricated prototypes were conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed robotic anthropomorphic system via a series of workspace, grasping, and in-hand manipulation tasks. The proposed BCL-13 hand offers a promising design solution to a lightweight, dexterous, affordable, and highly anthropomorphic robotic hand design.