A Compliant Hand Based on a Novel Pneumatic Actuator

The RBO Hand is a novel, highly compliant robotic hand. It exhibits robust grasping performance, is easy to build and prototype, and very cheap to produce. One of the primary design motivations is the extensive leverage of compliance to achieve robust shape matching between the hand and the grasped object. This effect results in robust grasping performance under sensing, model, and actuation uncertainty. We show the feasibility of our approach to constructing robotic hands in extensive grasping experiments on objects with varying properties, included water bottles, eye glasses, and sheets of fabric. The RBO hand is based on a novel pneumatic actuator, called PneuFlex, which exhibits desirable properties for robotic fingers.