Investigations on Asymmetric Flexible Pneumatic Actuators for Robotic Applications

Abstract

The Robotic hands are essential components of any Robotic system as they are required to work as human hand. Nowadays it is more and more important for robots to serve and help newlinepeople, especially the old and the disabled. There are about 1,000,000 people who had an newlineamputation of a hand or a complete arm worldwide. The main factors for a loss of upper or lower limbs are accidents followed by general diseases and injuries. The various multi-fingered or artificial hands that are available are essentially based on linkage-mechanisms such as wires, cables and chains, belts, artificial muscles, or hydraulic and pneumatic elements, etc. The multi-fingered hands actuated by pneumatic artificial muscle are costly and difficult to miniaturize. The need for an adaptable hand with flexibility, dexterousness and load carrying capacity analogous to the human hand seems to be the ideal one for robotic or prosthetic application. The artificial hands presently in use are complicated in design and control newlinestructure and also costly to be implemented for robotic or prosthetic applications. newline