Super under‐actuated multi‐fingered mechanical hand with modular self‐adaptive gear‐rack mechanism

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present recent work designing a mechanical robotic hand for self‐adaptive grasping, human‐like appearance, which can be used in a humanoid robot. Conventional robotic devices are relatively complex, large, cumbersome and difficult to be installed in a humanoid robot arm. Under‐actuated robot hands use less motors to drive more rotating joints, thus to simplify the mechanical structure, decrease the volume and weight and finally lower the difficulty of control and the cost.Design/methodology/approach – A novel under‐actuated finger mechanism is designed, which is based on a gear‐rack mechanism, spring constraint and an active sleeve middle phalanx. The principle analyses of its self‐adaptive grasp and end power grasping are given. A new multi‐fingered hand named as TH‐3R Hand is designed based on the finger.Findings – The design finger mechanism can be used in a robotic hand to make the hand obtain more degrees of freedom (DOF) with fewer actuators, and good graspi...