Soft robotic prosthetic hand

Soft robotics have advantages such as their inherent compliance, safety, robustness and ease of manufacture. Soft robotics are therefore ideal for applications requiring human-robot interactions such as robotic surgery, prosthetics and collaborative robots. This project will develop soft robotic actuators acting as fingers for use in prosthetic hands which currently require sophisticated design and control strategies. Soft robots can eliminate the need for complex mechanisms due to their inherent properties.

However, this presents additional challenges due to low output forces and stiffness. Many different methods have been established for overcoming this issue, but the technology is still far from achieving the goal of high load capacity and high compliance. Inspired by nature, we propose a novel soft actuator design. We also apply a stiffening principle called antagonistic stiffening, with which we are able to adjust the stiffness of our soft actuators in order to enhance the load capacity.