A Design of Tendon-Driven Mechanism for Flipping Motion on Robotic Finger

Anthropomorphic robot hands are required not only to have dexterity related to gripping and in-hand manipulation, but also to have dexterity to perform movements required in daily activities such as pressing the pad of a finger and flipping a finger. Many of the conventional robot hands that focus on these movements are limited to the realization of the movement of pressing the pad of the finger, and few focus on the movement of flipping the finger. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a hand design method that can perform both the action of pressing the pad of the finger and the action of flipping the finger. The design method proposed in this paper is to increase the stiffness of the tendon for extension rather than that of the tendon for flexion. In order to verify the effectiveness of proposed method, we compared the flight distance of coins when flipping coins with a conventional hand that can press the pad of a finger and the robot hand designed by proposed method.