Android Hands: A State-of-the-Art Report

Humans have adjusted their space, their actions, and their performed tasks according to their morphology, abilities, and limitations. Thus, the properties of a social robot should fit within these predetermined boundaries when, and if it is beneficial for the user, and the notion of the task. On such occasions, android and humanoid hand models should have similar structure, functions, and performance as the human hand. In this paper we present the anatomy, and the key functionalities of the human hand followed by a literature review on android/humanoid hands for grasping and manipulating objects, as well as prosthetic hands, in order to inform roboticists about the latest available technology, and assist their efforts to describe the state-of-the-art in this field.