A Single-Actuated, Cable-Driven, and Self-Contained Robotic Hand Designed for Adaptive Grasps

Developing a dexterous robotic hand that mimics natural human hand movements is challenging due to complicated hand anatomy. Such a practical design should address several requirements, which are often conflicting and force the designer to prioritize the main design characteristics for a given application. Therefore, in the existing designs the requirements are only partially satisfied, leading to complicated and bulky solutions. To address this gap, a novel single-actuated, cable-driven, and self-contained robotic hand is presented in this work. This five-fingered robotic hand supports 19 degrees of freedom (DOFs) and can perform a wide range of precision and power grasps. The external structure of fingers and the thumb is inspired by Pisa/IIT SoftHand, while major modifications are implemented to significantly decrease the number of parts and the effect of friction. The cable configuration is inspired by the tendon structure of the hand anatomy. Furthermore, a novel power transmission system is presented in this work. This mechanism addresses compactness and underactuation, while ensuring proper force distribution through the fingers and the thumb. Moreover, this power transmission system can achieve adaptive grasps of objects with unknown geometries, which significantly simplifies the sensory and control systems. A 3D-printed prototype of the proposed design is fabricated and its base functionality is evaluated through simulations and experiments.