Design of a Multi-palm Robotic Hand for Assembly Tasks

Some robotic tasks, especially those in which there are interactions between manipulated objects, require the collaborative work of two robotic arms equipped with end-effector grippers or robotic hands. Most of the current applications in which a bimanual task is attempted by a robot use two robot arm manipulators with simple grippers, in which the end-effectors are used for grasping and the remaining motion is performed by the robotic arms. In this work, we propose the design of a highly dexterous multi-fingered robotic hand, able to perform the bimanual task when attached to a simple arm manipulator. Dexterous robotic hands can be designed with more than one splitting stage; their design for a task can be done using kinematic synthesis for tree topologies. The synthesis process is applied in this case to the design of a robotic hand with three palms for a bimanual task consisting of assembling an emergency stop button.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft