Design and development of a triggered type underactuated grasping mechanism and its application to an experimental test bed

Abstract

Gripping devices that employ less actuators than they have degrees of freedom, i.e. those that employ underactuated mechanisms, can contribute significant savings in size, weight, complexity and cost of the device. Furthermore, the use of underactuated mechanisms gives the property of passive conformance of the gripper to objects of unknown shape and size. This work addresses two problems relating to underactuated gripping devices. The first problem is that there are very few designs of switching mechanisms for triggered type underactuated hands available in the literature. In this work four innovative concepts for these mechanisms are presented and are added to the literature. The second problem is that most design optimization work for underactuated hands in the literature is based on simulation, particularly for the case of triggered type devices. This work presents briefly the ongoing design and development of a versatile test bed for the experimental optimization of underactuated gripper design parameters, and for the validation of the simulation based approaches.