Design of a Multi-Palm Robotic Hand for Assembly Tasks

Abstract

Some robotic tasks, especially those in which there are interactions between manipulated objects, require the collaborative work of two robotic arms equipped with end-effector grippers or robotic hands. Most of the current applications in which a bimanual task is attempted by a robot use two robot arm manipulators with simple grippers, in which the end-effectors are used for grasping and the remaining motion is performed by the robotic arms. In this work, we propose the design of a highly dexterous multi-fingered robotic hand, able to perform the bimanual task when attached to a simple arm manipulator. Dexterous robotic hands can be designed with more than one splitting stage; their design for a task can be done using kinematic synthesis for tree topologies. The synthesis process is applied in this case to the design of a robotic hand with three palms for a bimanual task consisting of assembling an emergency stop button.