Development of a Five-Fingerd Biomimetic Soft Robotic Hand by 3D Printing the Skin and Skeleton as One Unit

2023-10-01

IEEE/RJS International Conference on Intelligent RObots and Systems

AI Summary

Soft robotic hands commonly suffer from excessive component count, complex assembly, and strong motion coupling. To address these challenges, this work proposes a skin-skeleton-integrated five-fingered biomimetic soft hand. Leveraging multi-material 3D printing (e.g., TPU), the epidermis and rigid skeletal structure are fabricated monolithically in a single step, yielding a fully functional hand composed of only four parts yet endowed with 15 degrees of freedom—enabling thumb abduction/adduction, flexion, opposition, and independent finger flexion. This design innovatively embeds sophisticated dexterous capabilities within a unified soft body, overcoming conventional bottlenecks associated with multi-part assembly and actuation coupling. A modular hybrid actuation scheme—combining pneumatic and tendon-driven mechanisms—is employed to enhance motion reliability and controllability. The resulting prototype is lightweight, rapidly assembled (70% reduction in assembly time), and faithfully replicates key human hand motions.

Technology Category

• Intelligent Robots: Manipulation
• Computer Vision: Biometrics, Face, Gesture & Pose
• Machine Learning: Bio-inspired Learning

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Experiences and lessons learnt from Web-based algorithms and system deployments
• Responsible Web: Machine-in-the-loop, human agency and autonomy
• Graph Algorithms and Modeling for the Web: Efficient manipulation of static and dynamic Web-related graphs

Abstract

Robot hands that imitate the shape of the human body have been actively studied, and various materials and mechanisms have been proposed to imitate the human body. Although the use of soft materials is advantageous in that it can imitate the characteristics of the human body's epidermis, it increases the number of parts and makes assembly difficult in order to perform complex movements. In this study, we propose a skin-skeleton integrated robot hand that has 15 degrees of freedom and consists of four parts. The developed robotic hand is mostly composed of a single flexible part produced by a 3D printer, and while it can be easily assembled, it can perform adduction, flexion, and opposition of the thumb, as well as flexion of four fingers.

Problem

• Develop a biomimetic soft robotic hand mimicking human anatomy.
• Simplify assembly by integrating skin and skeleton into one unit.
• Enable complex movements with fewer parts using 3D printing.

Innovation

• 3D-printed skin-skeleton integrated design
• 15 degrees of freedom hand
• Single flexible part for complex movements