The development of a low cost pneumatic air muscle actuated anthropomorphic robotic hand

Abstract

This paper presents the design of an anthropomorphic robotic hand of low-budget, achieving basic grasps similar to the human hand. The hand has an anthropomorphic design with 16 degrees of freedom (DOFs). With 14 Mckibben style pneumatic air muscles (PAM) implemented as the power actuator of the tendon-driven fingers, the actuator offers the robotic hand a compliant, soft grasp for manipulating objects in open-loop control. Besides, this work reports the force transmission layout that enables underactuation which allowed the use of fewer actuators to control the DOFs of the hand. The performance of the hand was accessed through testings using power and precision grasps. © 2012 The Authors.