Novel Bionic Soft Robotic Hand With Dexterous Deformation and Reliable Grasping

Abstract

Bionic soft robotic hand has been developed rapidly, as it can achieve considerable flexibility and mimic human hand to perform actions such as grasping. This study develops a novel bionic soft robotic hand, which consists of a palm and five fingers that can operate independently. Unlike other soft hands, the fingers of the developed soft robotic hand are capable of stretching and bending. The thumb can mimic the joint activities of human thumb. An air chamber is placed on the back of robotic hand to mimic the elongation of muscles on the back of human hand. As such, the curvature of the palm can be changed. A particle jamming method is used in the hand palm to achieve passive variable stiffness during grasping, which improves the grasping stability of the bionic hand and the ability of wrapping target objects. Grasping experiments are conducted to evaluate and validate the grasping performance of the developed soft robotic hand. The experimental results show that the developed soft hand can effectively grasp sheet, columnar, and irregular objects when the driving pressure of finger and hand back are 50 kPa and 40 kPa, respectively. The maximum grasping mass is comparable to the mass of the soft robotic hand.