Employing Magnets to Improve the Force Exertion Capabilities of Adaptive Robot Hands in Precision Grasps

Adaptive, underactuated and compliant robot hands have received an increased interest over the last decade. Possible applications of these systems range from the development of simple grippers for industrial automation to the creation of anthropomorphic devices that can be used as prosthetic hands. These hands are particularly capable of extracting stable grasps even under significant object pose or other environmental uncertainties, due to the underactuation and the structural compliance of their designs. Despite the increased interest and the promising performance, adaptive hands suffer from several disadvantages and drawbacks. For example, the use of underactuation can lead to a post-contact reconfiguration of the fingers that compromises the force exertion capabilities of the system during pinch grasping. In this paper, we focus on the design, modelling, development, and evaluation of an adaptive robot gripper that uses magnets to adjust the reconfiguration profile of the fingers. The effect of the magnets increases the gripper’s force exertion capabilities in pinch grasps, without compromising the full / caging grasps. The efficiency of the proposed gripper is experimentally validated through two different tests: i) a contact force test that compares the results of a theoretical model with the actual experimental results and ii) a grasping test that assesses the force exertion capabilities and the reconfiguration behaviour of the adaptive fingers for different implementations of the magnetic joints.