Design and Analysis of an Anthropomorphic Finger with Three Points Pneumatic Actuation

Abstract

The human being’s hand is a set of fingers and can achieve any shape to hold or grip or grasp the object of different shapes. In the industrial sectors, various robot manipulators with different types of end-effectors (robot grippers) are used to perform tasks like gripping the object, picking & dropping the object, holding the tool, etc. The different types of end-effectors are required for grasping according to the geometry of the object. In this paper, an anthropomorphic finger is designed to mimic the human being’s finger to achieve any shape as the human’s finger and this finger can be a part of the robotic hand easily. This single type of robotic hand can perform all tasks for grasping any geometry of the object. The proposed finger consists of three pin joints with three pneumatic muscles, which help to achieve the desired shape with maximum holding/grasping power. The CAD model is developed to visualize and analyze finger motion. The comparison of the proposed finger and a real human finger is presented for validation of results.  The results show that the proposed system can mimic the human finger and shape modulation.