Multi-jointed Robotic Finger Driven by Dielectric Elastomer Actuator

5 Multi-jointed Robotic Finger Driven by Dielectric Elastomer Actuator 

Up to now a wide variety of robot hands, mostly driven by servomotors, have been developed [Jacoben and et al. (1984) Jones (1997) Kawasaki et al. (2002)]. Although motors can provide acceptable performance, their major limitation is that they are voluminous, heavy and require complex transmission mechanisms. Aforementioned drawbacks are the major reasons that restrict robotic hands mainly to the laboratory development. In fact, existing robotic hands are considerably heavier compared to the human hand owing to the weight of the motors and complex transmission mechanisms. As one of the most demanding applications, a recent survey on the satisfaction with prosthetic devices has reported that approximately 23% of the participants were dissatisfied with the weight of their prosthetic iimb [Pezzin et al. (2004)]. 

In this section, we present a two DOF (degree-of-freedom) planar robot finger employing the multi-stacked DE actuator that has been discussed in Chapter 7. Since the proposed actuator is embedded in the link, the finger becomes compact, simple in mechanism, and lightweight. The design and control issues of the finger are briefly addressed in this Section. 

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