Journal
SCIENCE ROBOTICS
Volume 3, Issue 23, Pages -Publisher
AMER ASSOC ADVANCEMENT SCIENCE
DOI: 10.1126/scirobotics.aau5543
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Funding
- National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences of the NIH [TL1TR002386]
- Air Force Office of Scientific Research [FA9550-18-1-0243]
- Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award [N00014-17-1-2837]
- NSF MRSEC program [DMR-1719875]
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The force, speed, dexterity, and compact size required of prosthetic hands present extreme design challenges for engineers. Current prosthetics rely on high-quality motors to achieve adequate precision, force, and speed in a small enough form factor with the trade-off of high cost. We present a simple, compact, and cost-effective continuously variable transmission produced via projection stereolithography. Our transmission, which we call an elastomeric passive transmission (EPT), is a polyurethane composite cylinder that autonomously adjusts its radius based on the tension in a wire spooled around it. We integrated six of these EPTs into a three-dimensionally printed soft prosthetic hand with six active degrees of freedom. Our EPTs provided the prosthetic hand with about three times increase in grip force without compromising flexion speed. This increased performance leads to finger closing speeds of similar to 0.5 seconds (average radial velocity, similar to 180 degrees second(-1)) and maximum fingertip forces of similar to 32 newtons per finger.
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