Experimental determination of the Young's modulus for the fingers with application in prehension systems for small cylindrical objects

Abstract

A new methodology to determine experimentally the Young's modulus of the human fingers has been developed by the authors. The methodology consist in the experimentally variation of the elastic deformation for the finger in contact with a steel cylinder normal loaded from zero to 10 N. The Hertzian model for elastic deformation specific to a point contact between a cylindrical object and the index finger has been used to curve fitting the experimental curve for elastic deformation of the finger in the vicinity of imposed forces from 0.5N to 10 N. Values between 0.07 MPa and 0.2 MPa for Young's modulus of the finger have been obtained, in agreement with the values determined by the other authors using ball finger contacts or finger plane surface contacts.