On Mechanical Finger Design for Expanded Prescribed Grasping Poses

This work formulates and demonstrates a motion generation method for the synthesis of a multi-loop planar six-bar mechanism comparable to the Belgrade/USC robotic hand (13)(14). The method presented in this work can accommodate numbers of prescribed rigid-body poses beyond the maximum number of poses allowable using conventional planar six-bar mechanism synthesis models (10). The example included demonstrates the design of a mechanical hand to achieve twice the maximum number of displacements allowable with conventional synthesis models.