F3Hand: A Five-Fingered Prosthetic Hand Driven with Curved Pneumatic Artificial Muscles

Recently, many five-fingered prosthetic hands have been commercialized. However, most five-fingered prosthetic hands have heavyweight problems. In addition, their fingers with high rigidity are difficult to fit the object to be grasped. This paper reports a five-fingered prosthetic hand driven with curved pneumatic artificial muscles. By using the curved pneumatic artificial muscles as a skeleton and an actuator of the finger, flexible grasps and natural motions are achieved. Its weight of 255 g is less than one-third of the conventional fivefingered prosthetic hand. An evaluation using SHAP demonstrated that an amputee was able to operate various abstract objects.

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