Dimensional synthesis of three-fingered robot hands for maximal precision manipulation workspace

This paper applies dimensional synthesis to explore the geometric design of dexterous three-fingered robotic hands for maximizing precision manipulation workspace, in which the hand stably moves an object with respect to the palm of the hand, with contacts only on the fingertips. We focus primarily on the tripod grasp, which is the most commonly used grasp for precision manipulation. We systematically explore the space of design parameters, with two main objectives: maximize the workspace of a fully actuated hand and explore how under-actuation modifies it. We use a mathematical framework that models the hand-plus-object system and examine how the workspace varies with changes in nine hand and object parameters such as link length and finger arrangement on the palm. Results show that to achieve the largest workspaces the palm radius should be approximately half of a finger length larger than the target object radius, that the distal link of the two-link fingers should be around 1–1.2 times the length of the proximal link, and that fingers should be arranged symmetrically about the palm with object contacts also symmetric. Furthermore, a proper parameter design for an under-actuated hand can achieve up to 50% of the workspace of a fully actuated hand. When compared to the system parameters of existing popular hand designs, larger palms and longer distal links are needed to maximize the manipulation workspace of the studied design.