Rigid Skeleton Enhanced Dexterous Soft Finger Possessing Proprioception

This work presents a humanoid soft robotics finger design with rigid skeletons and proprioceptive sensors. This 4-DOFs dexterous finger has soft joints and rigid phalanxes, which is about the size of human hand. To enhance the overall stiffness and for human-like behavior and configuration, rigid-soft actuators which we called quasi-joints are introduced. Although their lengths are shortened in this design, the soft actuators can still bend over 90°, exhibiting joint-like flexion and abduction/adduction. Thus interphalangeal joints (IPs) and metacarpophalangeal joint (MCP) are realized. EGaIn soft sensors are embedded into the structure for bending detection. In addition, multi-step molding fabrication method is introduced for this complex multi-material structure. This rigid-soft finger is a preliminary work and modular part of a highly dexterous humanoid soft robotic hand.