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General application can include prosthetics, humanoids, assistive technologies, and remotely operated vehicles.The robotic hands can also be useful in other settings like subsea.
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Summary Stanford researchers at the Cutkosky Lab have demonstrated for the first time, compliant, underactuated, tendon-driven robotic hands that uses elastic finger joints and a spring transmission to achieve a variety of pinch and wrap grasps. The spring transmission is intended for distributing actuation among degrees of freedom in underactuated robotic hands. It is capable of passively achieving multiple stiffnesses based on actuation direction. This design is lightweight, compact and resilient to impacts, which is important in highly unstructured environments. This invention was validated as part of Ocean One while excavating a deep-sea archaeological site. The robotic hands can also be useful in other settings such as subsea industrial maintenance, researching marine habitats. More general application can include prosthetics, humanoids, assistive technologies, and remotely operated vehicles. Stage of Research The robotic hands were field tested as part of the Ocean One humanoid platform, which acquired a vase from the La Lune shipwreck site at 91 m depth in the Mediterranean Sea Applications The spring couplers could be used to drive individual fingers, such as the tendons in Ocean One Hand (Stuart, 2017), or could drive any combination of degrees of freedom in a grasping mechanism. This invention can be applied to any task that benefits from multifinger robotic grasping with variable transmission stiffness. Applications include prosthetics, humanoids, assistive technologies, and remotely operated vehicles. Advantages Compact, light-weight, and robust Resilient to impacts Can perform both gentle and strong grasps Only one actuator is needed to control the hand Spring transmission for distributing actuation among degrees of freedom in robotic hand Changes stiffness depending only on the direction of shaft actuation Employs SimGrasp, a flexible dynamic hand simulator, which enables parametric studies of the hand for acquisition and pull-out tests with varying transmission spring rates