Designing a single material biomimetic robotic hand

Abstract

This final year project presents a single material biomimetic robotic hand design that aims to reduce the time, resources and efforts required during manufacturing and assembly process. The design referred to human hand anatomy as the author believes that the robotic hand can better duplicates human hand functionality with a biomimetic design. Single material design allows the manufacturing process to be done in one time printing. The author makes use of jointing techniques to simplify the assembly process of the robotic hand. As a result, the robotic hand can be 3D-printed in less than 20 hours and takes about 15 minutes to assemble everything. While compared to other existing robotic hand usually take more than 30 hours to print and 1 hour to assemble. Followed by various experiments to test its performance and dexterity. Result shows that the design achieves similar functionality as other robotic hands, and at the same time greatly reduces the cost of manufacturing. Lastly, meaningful applications like alphabetic sign language and trading hand signal is discussed and demonstrated.