The human hand is one of the most complex appendages in the world. At least 29 small bones, 34 muscles, and about 123 ligaments. Now replicate that with a robotic hand.
Simple?
There have been thousands of designs of “robot” hands spanning centuries. Humans trying to replicate their own functionality with mechanical devices, biomimicry. Some designs boil all the functionality and complexity of a hand into only a few actuators (or motor, servo, one device that acts as a muscle would). A simple example would be a homemade cable hand. Some designers have taken an extreme route using the hand as a gigantic car crushing form of entertainment as “The Hand of Man” does. Some have pushed the extreme limits of today’s technology to make, as much as possible, a robotic hand that has all the degrees of freedom that a real human hand does, like the ongoing DEXMART project or even Shadow Robotic’s Hand .
What we take for granted in our own human hands becomes painfully apparent as soon as you start to design one.
How many degrees of freedom do I need? What exact positions should it be able to achieve? How much force do I need at each joint? How am I going to transmit the actuators motion all the way down to a small fingertip?
Most importantly: how much is this going to cost???
Because there are those of us out there that do not have $100,000 sitting in our bank accounts just taking up space, and we at the same time do not want a $50 piece of copper tubes and wire from a hardware store fashioned into a “hand”. There needs to be an in-between.
The Custom Entertainment Solutions’ “DYN Hand Gen3” has fit this bill.
It does capture 13 degrees of freedom most important to research teams.
It does have a skin.
And most importantly it is affordable.
Controlled by simple PWM inputs and powered by a single 6 VDC supply this hand can be immediately put to use by even novice roboticists. If you have programmed motion for a hobby servo you can program for the industrial strength servos inside the DYN Hand Gen3.
This is a great robotic hand to use for human/machine interaction research.
2012