Design Paradigms Based on Spring Agonists for Underactuated Robot Hands: Concepts and Application
This work addresses a specific problem in robotics for designing more efficient and versatile underactuated robot hands, representing an incremental advancement by formalizing and combining existing concepts.
The paper tackles the design of underactuated robot hands by introducing a paradigm using springs as agonists and tendons as antagonists, formalized in a design matrix, and demonstrates its application in a physical prototype to achieve desired postural synergies with a single motor.
In this paper, we focus on a rarely used paradigm in the design of underactuated robot hands: the use of springs as agonists and tendons as antagonists. We formalize this approach in a design matrix also considering its interplay with the underactuation method used (one tendon for multiple joints vs. multiple tendons on one motor shaft). We then show how different cells in this design matrix can be combined in order to facilitate the implementation of desired postural synergies with a single motor. Furthermore, we show that when agonist and antagonist tendons are combined on the same motor shaft, the resulting spring force cancellation can be leveraged to produce multiple desirable behaviors, which we demonstrate in a physical prototype.