Development of an Index Finger for the Dexterous Hand for Space

Abstract

International Space Station and other building project in the lower orbit rises the demand of EVA(extra vehicular activity), and due to this, the robots that helps EVA is highly expected. In this paper, we clear the development and designing requests of EVA Supporting Robot and its dexterous hand. The dexterous hand used in the EVA must be small enough to use EVA tools, able to output high grasping power and modularized so that the hand can be exchanged depending on the mission. Following to the requests, we designed a test model of dexterous hand. In this paper, new index robot finger for our dexterous hand is introduced. The finger consists of 1 actuator and 1 passive joint. The architecture and features of this finger are shown in the last half of this paper.