GCUA Humanoid Robotic Hand with Tendon Mechanisms and Its Upper Limb

Upper limbs of human beings are extremely special and significant, which obtain crucial function to achieve manipulations intelligently and dexterously. Gesture-Changeable Under-Actuated (GCUA) grasping function is presented to improve the capability of robotic hands to achieve humanoid manipulations with low dependence on control and sensor feedback systems, which includes traditional under-actuated (UA) grasping motion and special prebending (PB) motion. Based on GCUA function, GCUA Hand II is developed, which has 5 fingers and 14 DOF. All the fingers use similar tendon mechanisms and motors to achieve GCUA function. With GCUA Hand II, a humanoid robot upper limb system is designed, which has two 3-DOF arms actuated by stepper motors and two 14-DOF hands actuated by DC motors. The control system includes four parts: a computer, a FPGA motion controller, a driver module, and a user module, which can control the upper limb system to do various movements dexterously and exactly. With C++ language, a spatial motion program is designed to assist researchers to determine spatial motions of the upper limb system. This system has a great prospect in the field of rehabilitation engineering, extremely environmental manipulation, humanoid robotics and social services.