On Alternative Uses of Structural Compliance for the Development of Adaptive Robot Grippers and Hands.

Adaptive robot hands are typically created by introducing structural compliance either in their joints (e.g., implementation of flexures joints) or in their finger-pads.

Open-source, low-cost, compliant, modular, underactuated fingers: towards affordable prostheses for partial hand amputations.

In this paper we present a series of design directions for the development of affordable, compliant, modular, underactuated robot fingers, that can be used as prostheses by amputees that suffer from various partial hand amputations (index to pinky fingers are considered). Our design is based on parametric models that have been derived from hand anthropometry studies. Various interfaces have been considered in order to control the prosthesis, depending on the type and level of amputation.