Modular robotic hand quickly changes finger layout for better grasping
ORBIT: A Modular Multi-finger Robotic Hand Platform with Rotational Finger Reconfiguration
Robotics
Summary
Robotic hands can be made with different finger shapes and arrangements, but it’s hard to compare which designs work best for different tasks. The authors built a robotic hand called ORBIT that can quickly rotate its fingers around the palm to try out a variety of layouts without taking the hand apart. They tested three finger setups on various objects, showing that ORBIT can handle tricky tasks like turning a cube’s face or threading a lid. This platform helps scientists and engineers directly compare how well different finger designs perform.
What this means in practice
- •For robotic manipulation engineers: Test different finger arrangements on the same robotic hand to evaluate grasping strategies for complex tasks.
- •For industrial robot designers: Create adaptable robotic hands that reconfigure finger layouts quickly to handle a variety of objects on assembly lines.$Commercial implications: Enables development of versatile robotic grippers that improve automation efficiency by switching finger setups to suit different products.
Authors
Benito Ribadeneira, Siqi Shang, Lillian Chin
Abstract
Despite the popularity of multi-fingered robotic hands for dexterous manipulation, there is no systematic platform to compare different hand morphologies against one another. We present ORBIT (Orbital Reconfigurable Base-actuated Integrated Theta-motion Hand), a modular platform designed to enable principled exploration of multi-fingered hand morphology. The core contribution of ORBIT is a rotating knuckle mechanism, where independent fingers travel around a cylindrical palm via a belt drive. This enables ORBIT to perform quick recon- figuration (< 1 s) of finger layout without hand disassembly. ORBITs a robust system, with finger average angular velocity of 1.57 rad / s1 and a root finger force resistance of 50 N. Using a three fingers instantiation of ORBIT, we demonstrate an initial pilot grasping study, comparing anthropomorphic, isometric, and Barrett-style finger layouts across eleven objects of varied size, shape, and texture. We further demonstrate how ORBITs nonanthropomorphic orbital DOF enables the achievement of tasks that would be difficult to perform with fixed-knuckle designs, such as cube face reorientation, lid threading, and precision pinching of sub-centimeter objects. These results establish ORBIT as a viable platform for direct apples to apples comparison of multi-fingered hand morphologies for specific manipulation tasks