A novel under-actuated bionic hand and its grasping stability analysis

This article presents a novel under-actuated robot hand, which has a thumb and two cooperative fingers. The thumb has two joints with 2 degrees of freedom driven by one motor. Each of the other two fingers has the same mechanism structure with the thumb and forms a cooperative mechanism, which is driven by only one motor with 4 degrees of freedom in total. All the under-actuated fingers are designed with the transmission mechanisms based on a kind of mechanism combined with the linkage mechanism and the passive elements. In this article, it is shown that under-actuated hand is able to reproduce most of the grasping behaviors of the human hand anthropomorphically and self-adaptively, without increasing the complexity of mechanism and control. The grasping stability analysis is given to help to understand the size range and load range of a stable grasp. Finally, the experiment results verify the high efficiency and stability of the novel mechanism.