Design and Evaluation of a Low Friction Rigid-Soft Hybrid Mechanism for Hand Exoskeletons with Finite Element Analysis

Hand exoskeletons are attracting rising research interest for assistance in daily life. Friction is a critical issue for hand exoskeletons intended to enable dexterous finger movements. This paper presents a rigid-soft hybrid assistive hand exoskeleton using a low friction mechanism based on the multi-layered springs with rolling contact. The low friction designs not only facilitate the high transparency of the device, but also the possibility of accurate modeling in mechanics. Regarding the large deformation nature of the nonlinear mechanism, finite element analysis (FEA) has been used to explore its kinematic and kinetic characteristics. Experiments were carried out on the implemented prototype to compare the numerical results with the measured. The results demonstrate that this modeling method can provide valuable guidance for better parameter selection and optimization.