OVERVIEW

1. Importance of robotic hand

In the recent years, many researches on designing and controlling robotic hand
have been proceeded and got the attention of lots of research center. As the result,
several design methods and prototypes of robotic hand have been proposed. The
researches on this field follow one of three approach. The first approach focuses on
replicating the features of human hand and mimics the human closely, which requires
numerous sensors and actuators. Another approach is a variant of the first one, which
recreates the shape of human hand but reduce the number of DOFs with purpose of
simplify the design make the control algorithm much more clarify. The last approach
intended to apply human hand biometric on service robotics to grip objects to work on
industry project. Consequently, researches on robotic hand have work on mimic
human hand to assist patient with disability in the upper extremities and apply hand
atonomy on design robotic gripper.

Inspite of many advances, a dexterous robotic hand which is able to replicate the
dynamic of biological hand remains one of the biggest challenges in robotics.
Mimicing the human trend comes from the desire of mankind wish for interacting with
human-like robot and exigency of better bionic hand for disability people. To solve
this task, a design of human hand with contain 27 DOFs of human hand with the same
shape is definitely the best solution due to its unique dexterity and robustness.
Therefore, the anatomy research on human hand provide righterous perspectives to
design anthropomorphic robotic hand.

After studying on operation of human hands, the researches have sought to

design robotic mechanisms which imitate the motion of human hand. There are two
main parts of a significant human hand: fingers and wrist. The anatomy of the finger is
illustrated in Fig. 1(a), it indicated that every finger but the thump has four phalangeal
bones: metacarpal, proximal, intermediate and distal phalanges. These bones are
connected by collateral ligament, volar plate and joint capsule, which combine into
revolution joints named the metacarpophalangeal (MCP), the proximal interphalangeal
(PIP) and the distal interphalangeal (DIP) joint. MCP joint has 2 DOFs, two other
joints have 1 DOF each. aaaaa

a) b) c)

Fig. 1. Anatomy of human finger: a) phalanges and joints b) illustration of

tendons

c) exemple of a cable-driven robotic finger

The human hand’s movement is undercontrolled by muscles which are located in

the forearm and generate power to stretch the tendon (Fig. 1(b)), named the flexor
digitorum profundus (FDP) and the flexor digitorum superficialis (FDS). The idea of
control the movement by the tensions is also beneficial for robotic hands since it can
keep the size of the hand moderate without sarificing strength. A simple cable-driven
mechanism is illustrated in Fig. 1(c), which have been applied in plenty commercial
robotic hand, however a simple mechanism with cable and pulleys cannot mimic the
movement of human hand precisely. An anthropomorphic robotic hand should have
robustness against impact and overload and should be able to generate high force
similar to human hand, therefore a simple design in Fig. 1(c) cannot satisfy technology
requirements. Hence, many researchs have been proceed and many innovations have
been achieved, some robotic hands which have human-like characteristics can be listed
as: pisa/IIT softhand 2 [1], DLR hand [2], RoboRay hand [3], FLLEX hand [4].
Among these robotic hand, FFLEX hand is supposed to be the most successful one
which contains 15 DOFs, especially this robotic hand used robust rolling contact joints
instead bearing. The finger design of FFLEX hand is illustrated in Fig. 2, by applying
lubricating fluid on joint, it replicates the mechanism of human finger superbly. Even
so this model has not mimiced the movement of metacarpal phalanx exactly and it also
does not contain wrist joint. Additionally, only prototype of finger contains metacarpal
phalanx’s control mechanism, the FLLEX hand has simplified this joint to decrease
number of actuator.

Fig. 2.
Mechanical design of FFLEX hand finger

Finally, an anthropomorphic robotic hand is supposed to contain wrist join. A

human hand wrist joint is illustrated in Fig. 3, it includes 8 small bones which arranged
in a hemisphere, two hand bones ulna and radius also have a hemisphere-shaped tip,
therefore a wrist can actuate like a ball joint.
 Fig. 2. Human wrist bones

There were two wrist designs seem to be much more successful than the others,
the first one was AMBIDEX Arm Joint of IRIM Lab Koreatech, which use the
mechanism like Stewart platform. The second design come from DLR hand [2] used
its very unique design which let the cable pass through easily.

In conclusion, numerous designs have been evolved recently, nevertheless there

is still not a design which can mimics the human hand absolutely. A future design of
anthropomorphic robotic hand should satisfy these requirements:

- Be able to generate high force as human hand.

- Robustness against impact and over load
- Kinematically accurate mechanisms for precise manipulation
- Keep the size of the model fairly

Keywords: anthropomorphic, robotic hand, robotic gripper, humanoid robot,

anthropomorphism, tendon- driven mechanism, flexible robot, bioinspired mechanism.
 References:

[1] Cosimo et al., “Toward dexterous manipulation with augmented adaptive

synergies: The pisa/IIT softhand 2,” IEEE Trans. Robot., vol. 34, no 5, pp. 1141–1156,
Oct. 2018

[2] M. Grebenstein et al., “Antagonistically driven finger design for the

anthropomorphic DLR hand Arm system,” in Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. Intell. Robots
Syst., 2011, pp. 1836–1842.

[3] Y.-J. Kim et al., “RoboRay hand: A highly backdrivable robotic hand with
sensorless contact force measurements,” in Proc. Int. Conf. Robot. Autom., 2014, pp.
6712–6718.

[4] Y.-J. Kim et al., “Fluid Lubricated Dexterous Finger Mechanism for Human-
Like Impact Absorbing Capability,” in Proc. IEEE Robotics and Automation letters,
Vol. 4, No. 4, 2019, pp. 3971-3978.

[5] A. Mottard, T. Laliberté, and C. Gosselin, “Underactuated tendondriven

robotic/prosthetic hands: Design issues,” in Proc. Conf. Robot., Sci. Syst., Cambridge,
Massachusetts, USA, Jul. 2017, doi: 10.15607/RSS.2017.XIII.019.