Mechanical System and Control System of a Dexterous Robot Hand

In recent years numerous robot systems with multifingered grippers or hands have been developed all around the world. Many different approaches have been taken, anthropomorphic and non-anthropomorphic ones. Not only the mechanical structure of such systems was investigated, but also the necessary control system. With the human hand as an exemplar, such robot systems use their hands to grasp diverse objects without the need to change the gripper. The special kinematic abilities of such a robot hand, like small masses and inertia, make even complex manipulations and very fine manipulations of a grasped object within the own workspace of the hand possible. Such complex manipulations are for example regrasping operations needed for the rotation of a grasped object around arbitrary angles and axis without depositing the object and picking it up again. In this paper an overview on the design of such robot hands in general is given, as well as a presentation of an example of such a robot hand, the Karlsruhe Dexterous Hand II. The paper then ends with the presentation of some new ideas which will be used to build an entire new robot hand for a humanoid robot using fluidic actuators.