The development and maintenance of a reliable interactive dexterous robot hand for museum exhibition

This paper describes the design, construction, installation and maintenance of an interactive dextrous robot hand exhibit built for display at one of the United Kingdom's largest science and technology museums. The vast majority of dextrous robot hands are used in laboratory environments and so long term reliability is rarely a major design consideration. However, reliability is critically important for a museum exhibit as it is not acceptable to have a display out of order for long periods of time. The hand designed in this work therefore had to be very reliable.