Kinematic analysis of four-fingered tendon actuated robotic hand

This paper presents a four-fingered robotic hand, designed to carry out grasping operations along with different object manipulation tasks. The design of this hand resembles a human hand which is the perfect dexterous robotic gripper. In this paper, the forward kinematics of the designed hand is carried out using the Denavit-Hartenberg (D-H) parameters, to calculate the position and orientation of each of the fingertips. Inverse kinematics of the hand is formulated to compute the different joint angles for different fingertip configurations. Kinematic simulations are realised to estimate the workspace of the four finger robotic hand using the MATLAB interface. All possible fingertip trajectories are plotted in joint space to determine the motion constraints of the developed hand model. The results obtained confirm that the hand is suitable for grasping objects of variable geometry and materials within its workspace. The motion of the fingers is flexible enough for different object manipulation. These analysis shows that this hand is capable to perform the desired tasks successfully.