A Biologically Inspired Soft Robotic Hand Using Chopsticks for Grasping Tasks

Conference paper
First Online:
Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNCS, volume 9825)

Abstract

In this paper we investigate the dexterity of human manipulation capabilities by using a soft robotic hand. We built a robotic hand based on our inspiration from the real human’s, which is capable of handling chopsticks for grasping variations of objects. The robotic hand is made of soft structures, by using anthropomorphic configurations of bones, joints, ligaments, and tendons, that are connected to a minimum set of motor components, i.e. only four servomotors. By developing a minimalistic physics model of chopstick handling and its simulation experiments, we have identified one of the necessary conditions of actuation which enables the robot to grasp variations of small objects, those with different shape, size and weight.

Keywords

Biomimetics Robot hand Soft Robotics 
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Notes

Acknowledgement

This research was supported by the RoboSoft: Coordination Action for Soft Robotics, funded by the European Commission under the Future and Emerging Technologies (FP7-ICT-2013-C project No 619319), and the Cambridge Commonwealth, European and International Trust.

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Copyright information

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Biologically Inspired Robotics Laboratory, Department of EngineeringUniversity of CambridgeCambridgeUK
  2. 2.Department of Mechanical and Process EngineeringETH ZurichZurichSwitzerland

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