Design of Soft Flexible Wire-driven Finger Mechanism for Contact Pressure Distribution

We proposed the soft flexible wire-driven finger mechanism with the soft skin and the multi-joint skeletal structure using two coil springs. The multi-joint skeletal structure is mainly composed of two coil springs, multiple skeletal members and a fiber wire, and the soft skin is formed outside of them. The soft skin and the multi-joint skeletal structure make it possible to distribute the contact pressure, which is necessary for not only touching a living body such as a human or an agricultural crop, but also for touching an artificial object such as pastry or an industrial product without damaging it or its package. In this paper, we describe the design of the soft flexible wire-driven finger mechanism and development of the three-fingered hand using the finger mechanism we proposed.