Reconfigurable Underactuated Adaptive Gripper Designed by Morphological Computation

Anthropomorphic robotic grippers are required for robots, prostheses, and orthosis to enable manipulation of a priori unknown and variable-shape objects. It has to meet a wide range of sometimes contradictory requirements in terms of adaptivity, dexterity, high payload to weight ratio, robustness, aesthetics, compactness, lightweight, etc. Within this paper, we utilize the morphological computation approach to introduce design for anthropomorphic re-configurable underactuated grippers. The key to fingers' adaptivity is embedded passive variable length links and elastic elements at input joints. Based on this concept, we designed a palm-size five-finger gripper, where 14 DoFs, including thumb, are controlled by just 4 motors, such that it can perform both precision pinch and encompassing power grasps of various objects. The paper describes synthesized linkages for digits, hand design overview, control strategy, and test results of a physical prototype.