Design of a Dexterous Anthropomorphic Robot Hand

Abstract

According to the study of grasping of the human hand, it is noted that the metacarpal link of the thumb plays the key role in power grasping. Also the face of fingertip can be discriminated into five parts depending on the grasping modalities such as pinch grasp, fingertip grasp and power grasp. In this paper, the design of the anthropomorphic robot hand which has a thumb and three fingers is proposed. A differece of SKKU hand II from the previous gripperlike robot hand is that the metacarpal bone is connected between the thumb and the palm. This thumb mechanism is specially designed to get the degree of freedom which can realize flexible motions relative to objects. Based on the analysis, the hand mechanism is developed. Since the driving circuits for the hand are embedded in the hand, only the communication lines supporting CAN protocol with DC power cable are necessary as the input. A new robot is manufactured and feasibility of the hand is validated through preliminary experiments.