Design and Development of an Active Tendon Actuation System for a Soft Robotic Finger Using a Kinematic Analysis

In this paper, an active tendon actuation system for soft robotic finger is proposed using a slider crank mechanism. A slider crank mechanism is used to actuate the tendon card to grip the object with the necessary finger strength. for smooth operation, the soft robot finger is designed to work in two modes, namely speed and force mode. A soft robotic finger is made by 3D printing technology with the help of CAD tools. The rotary encoders are used to predict the joint angles, which are used to predict the force at the tip of the soft finger using kinematic analysis. A load cell is attached to the distal phalanx to estimate the actual force exerted by the tendon card at the tip of the soft robotic finger. The experimental results show that the actual force exerted by the soft robot finger is perfectly consistent with the estimated force calculated by kinematic analysis based on the joint angles. The performance of the active tendon card actuation mechanism is validated against other recent works.