Anthropomorphic hand based on twisted-string-driven da Vinci’s mechanism for approaching human dexterity and power of grasp

Designing anthropomorphic prosthetic hands that approach human-level performance remains a great challenge. Commercial prosthetics are still inferior to human hands in several important properties, such as weight, size, fingertip force, grasp velocity, and active and passive dexterities. We present a novel design based on the under-actuated da Vinci’s mechanism driven by a flexible twisted string actuator (TSA). The distributed drive scheme allows structural optimization using a motion capture database to reproduce the natural movement of human hands while keeping adaptability to free-form objects. The application of TSA realizes a high conversion from motor torque to tendon contraction force while keeping the structure light, flexible, and compact. Our anthropomorphic prosthetic hand, consisting of six active and 15 passive degrees of freedom, has a weight of 280 g, approximately 70% of that of a human hand. It passed 30 of the 33 Feix grasp tests on objects in daily living and retained a loading capacity of 5 kg. This simple but intelligent mechanism leads to excellent stability and adaptability and renders feasible wide applications in prosthetics and in service robots.