Orientation and Workspace Analysis of the Multifingered Metamorphic Hand—Metahand

Abstract

This paper introduces for the first time a metamorphic palm and presents a novel multifingered hand, known as Matahand, with a foldable and flexible palm that makes the hand adaptable and reconfigurable. The orientation and pose of the new robotic hand are enhanced by additional motion of the palm, and workspace of the robotic fingers is complemented with the palm motion. To analyze this enhanced workspace, this paper introduces finger-orientation planes to relate the finger orientation to palm various configurations. Normals of these orientation planes are used to construct a Gauss map. Adding an additional dimension, a 4-D ruled surface is generated to illustrate orientation and pose change of the hand, and an orientation-pose manifold is developed from the orientation-pose ruled surface. The orientation and workspace analysis are further developed by introducing a triangular palm workspace that evolves into a helical surface and is further developed into a 4-D representation. Simulations are presented to illustrate the characteristics of this new dexterous hand.

Recent development on innovation design of reconfigurable mechanisms in China

“…Research on metamorphic mechanisms has resulted in great improvements in the fundamentals, analytical approaches, and structure synthesis methods [2]. At the same time, a large number of applications have been developed, such as metamorphic hands [3,4], operating metamorphic mechanism for a spacecraft hatch [5], metamorphic parallel mechanism platform with redundant drives [6], and broken strand reposition metamorphic mechanism for extra-high-voltage power transmission lines [7].…”

A Complete Method for Workspace Boundary Determination on General Structure Manipulators

“…so that S will be the set of points q = [z T , u T ] T satisfying (9) for which Φ z is rank deficient. Note however that, because of the form of (10), Φ z has the block structure…”

Spherical trigonometry constrained kinematics for a dexterous robotic hand with an articulated palm

“…In order to reduce the limitations and provide robotic hands with greater workspace and additional dexterity and versatility, a novel metamorphic robotic hand was invented and developed by Dai and his colleagues [14][15][16][17] based on the concept of metamorphosis 18 stemming from origami folding. 19,20 The novelty of the metamorphic robotic hand lies in the introduction of an articulated palm which is formed by a spherical metamorphic linkage that provides the palm capability of changing mobility, topology and configuration.…”