Preliminary Design of an Anthropomorphic Dexterous Hand for a 2-Years-Old Humanoid

Abstract. This paper presents the latest results in developing an anthropomorphic dextrous hand for a 2-years-old humanoid. As this robot is aimed to be a physical platform for cog-nition, the number of degrees of freedom of the upper part of the body has been maximized. The robotic hand has 20 DoFs and 9 motors to accomplish optimal grasping and manipula-tion. Based on the manipulation tasks required in the project and on the human hand functional anatomy, a mixed implementation of cable directly driven and under-actuated joints has been designed, developed, tested and debugged. The abduction/adduction of the fingers and the hollowing of the palm have been implemented and coupled together, driven by a single actuator. The latest prototype has been developed; it includes the hand mecha-nism, the actuators, the control electronics, and a proprioceptive sensory system for position and grasping force control.