Displacement and Force Field Characterization of an Instrumented Compliant Anatomical Palmar Mechanism for a Bio-inspired Robotic Hand

This paper presents the design concept of an Instrumented Compliant Anatomical Palmar Mechanism (I-CAPM), which leverages the deformable curvatures of compliant beams to reconstruct the palm’s displacement and force fields during grasping. The I-CAPM models the human palm using eight cantilever beams, with four beams converging at the thumb knuckle and the remainder individually connecting to the finger knuckles, emulating the human hand’s oblique, transverse, and longitudinal arches. To enable independent analysis, each decoupled cantilever is embedded with a strain sensor array, allowing for field reconstruction on a single beam level. This architecture simplifies computational modeling and facilitates robust strain field reconstruction, deformation analysis, and real-time force perception. The methodology for characterizing the displacement and force fields of the beams is numerically illustrated and validated using commercial finite-element analysis (FEA).