Analysis and design for changing finger posture in a robotic hand

In this paper, design considerations are proposed for improving grasping capabilities of a low-cost easy-operation three-finger robotic hand. Through a suitable additional mechanism design, a special planetary gear mechanism has been designed to adjust the position and orientation of two fingers during hand’s operation. This novel solution significantly improves the flexibility of a robotic hand in terms of sizes and shapes of objects which can be grasped. Furthermore, both pinching and enveloping grasp configurations can be achieved similarly to human hands. Simulations are performed in Adams environment whose results show effectiveness of the proposed mechanism design both in terms of kinematic and dynamic performance.