Three-finger SMA robot hand and its practical analysis

Gripping of different types of objects with a multi-finger robot hand is a vital task for robot arms. Grippers, which are end effector elements in robot applications, are employed in various industrial operations such as transferring, assembling, welding and painting. However, if a gripper is considered for handling different jobs or to carry different types of parts in an assembly line, a general-purpose robot hand is going to be required. There are various technological actuators of robot hands such as electrical, hydraulic and pneumatic motors, etc. Besides these conventional actuators, it is possible to include Shape Memory Alloys (SMA) in the category of technological actuators. The SMA can give materials motion by moving to a predetermined position, at a specific temperature. The conversion of this motion to a gripping action of the robot hand is the heart of the matter. In this study, a robot hand is developed using Ni-Ti SMA and a set of experiments were performed in order to check the compatibility of the system in an industrial environment.