Fiber-reinforced Soft Robotic Anthropomorphic Finger

Robotic fingers have attracted considerable attentions of researchers from multidisciplinary fields. Most of the existing devices apply rigid components such as springs, joints, gears etc., to achieve the locomotor performance of the human finger. However, high-cost, complexity hold back their practical application. Meanwhile, the material properties of these rigid components are significantly different from the biological tissues to bring in considerable risk and difficulty in human-robot interaction. In this paper, a novel soft robotic anthropomorphic finger was presented, which was purely made of low cost soft hyperelastic materials (around 1.5 dollars) and was pneumatically actuated. The morphology of the robotic finger was a replica of an adult-human finger. The chambers, fiber orientation and the skin layers were designed in concert therefore to achieve human finger-like movement. The kinematic and dynamic model of the soft robotic finger were built based on experimental empirical method. While operating underwater, DPIV experiments revealed that the underwater pinch performance of a two-finger gripper prototype is significantly affect by the position relative to the gripped object.