A soft robotic glove for hand motion assistance

Soft robotic devices have the potential to be widely used in daily lives for their inherent compliance and adaptability, which result in high safety under unexpected situations. System complexity and requirements are much lower, comparing with conventional rigid-bodied robotic devices, which also result in significantly lower costs. This paper presents a robotic glove by utilizing soft artificial muscles providing redundant degrees of freedom (DOFs) to generate both flexion and extension hand motions for daily grasping and manipulation tasks. Different with the existing devices, to minimize the weight applied to the user's hands, pneumatic soft actuators were located on the fore arm and drive each finger via cable-transmission mechanisms. This actuation mechanism brings extra adaptability, motion smoothness, and user safety to the system. This design makes wearable robotic gloves more light-weight and user-friendly. Both theoretical and experimental analyses were conducted to explore the mechanical properties of pneumatic soft actuators. In addition, the fingertip trajectories were analyzed using Finite Element Methods, and a series of experiments were conducted evaluating both the technical and practical performances of the proposed glove.