Development of a Human Hand-Based Anthropomorphic Gripper for Prehensiletasks

Robots are being widely used in surgery, health care, industrial and mechatronics workcells; their structures are mostly based on human and animal characteristics. Inspired by the biomechanics of the human hand, this paper presents the development of an anthropomorphic mechatronics device for performing various grasps (spherical, planar and cylindrical), which are commonly used in daily interactions with objects within our environment. This project aims to guarantee a flexible device can be used as a training platform for offline and online programming. The system’s architecture is composed of the mechanical device designed using the Assur’s group mechanism, a processing grasp module and a Virtual Reality tool. The connection between the hardware and software is accomplished using the virtual instrumentation and the circuitry for controlling the inputs and outputs of the system.