Abstract

Compared to the serial type of six-freedom robot arm attached with an end-effector, the multi-fingered hand system can provide more dexterity and versatility in the field of autonomous manipulation tasks. Designs of multi-fingered hands can be found in the literature, to name a few, Mechanical Hand by Skinner [13], Multi-jointed Finger System by Okada [6], Stanford/JPL Hand (or Salisbury Hand) [11], Utah-MIT Hand [3], and NTU-1 Hand [5]. Generally, these mechanical hand systems have been designed to simulate a subset function of human hands. The structures of these systems basically resemble the skeleton of human hand and are constructed by designers’ intuition. Not much literature addressed about the structural synthesis of multi-fingered hands.

This paper presents a new approach for the structural synthesis of multi-fingered hands. It takes into account both the total mobility and the force closure criterion of the system. Based upon the Grübler’s mobility equation, relations regarding the numbers of fingers, contact geometry, and object freedoms are established. Subsequently, by applying the force closure criterion, the total number of possible multi-fingered hands with given mobility are synthesized.

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