Designing an underactuated mechanism for a 1 active DOF finger operation

In this paper a novel finger mechanism with 1 active DOF is proposed for an underactuated operation. The underacuation mechanism design is based on spring elements within the mechanism structure. The feasibility of the mechanism is verified through suitable kinematic and static analysis to give performance characteristics. The finger mechanism is able to obtain a human-like grasping operation and it can be embedded within the finger body with human-size mechanical design. The proposed finger mechanism is presented also as obtained from a synthesis procedure which is based on the analyzed characteristics. A design solution is proposed and tested through numerical simulation.