International Journal of Robotics and Automation (IJRA)

Vol. 1, No. 2, June 2012, pp. 69~77

ISSN: 2089-4856
69

Design and Analysis of a Multifingered Robot Hand

Pramod Kumar Parida, Bibhuti Bhusan Biswal

Department of Mechanical Engineering
National Institute of Technology
Rourkela-749008, Odisha, India, telp/fax (+91)661 2474840

Article Info ABSTRACT

Article history: With the advent of new control techniques and development of
microactuators, manipulator designers have gained inpetus todevelop
Received Apr 12, 2012 manipulators and the related devicesthat is more flexible, responsive, smart
Revised May 20, 2012 and anthropomorphic.Taking cue from the work of a number of
Accepted May 27, 2012 researchersover a couple of decades, the present work is a systematic attempt
to develop a five fingered anthropomorphic robotic hand with 25 DoFs. The
hand closely follows the anatomy of a typical human hand. The paper
Keyword: presents the structure of the proposed hand and its model for kinematic
analysis. The kinematic analysis has been carried out using conventional
robot hand method using MATLab software. The result obtained through the analysis
anthropomorphic confirmed that the robot hand conforms to the objective.
kinematic analysis
manipulation Copyright © 2012 Institute of Advanced Engineering and Science.
simulation All rights reserved.
Corresponding Author:
First Author
Department of Mechanical Engineering, National Institute of Technology Rourkela-749008, Odisha, India,
telp/fax (+91)661 2474840
e-mail: [email protected]

1. INTRODUCTION
An effective robot hand should be multifunctional, adaptive and flexible. It is always desirable to
develop a robotic hand which can mimic a human hand. Over last few decades researchers have been trying
to develop various multi-fingered robot hands, which can be used for a specific set of applications. In these
days the multi-fingered hands find their potential applications in many applications in industrial, domestic,
allied services and medical environments. Especially in case of assistive and artificial limbs the hand should
be anthropomorphic. However as the number of fingers increases and the number of degrees of freedom on a
single finger or on the whole of hand increase, the actuation mechanism and the associated control
architecture become complicated. Therefore most of the multi fingered hands with large number of DoFs are
underactuated. Stable grasping and fine manipulation with the multi finger rodot hands are playing an
important role in the field of manufacturing, rehabilitation and other applications that require precision and
dexterity[1]. Dexterous grasping is the specific task and it has been accepted and adopted by many
researchers as apriority issue while designing the hands. The essential modifications related to the robotic
grippers such as improved force sensing capacity and improved flexibilities at the gripping are to be
implemented.The multi-fingered robot hand acts as a multipurpose gripping device for various tasks with
multiple-degrees-of-freedom. Some of the important multi-fingered hands are WENDY hand [2], Utah/MIT
hand [3], DLR hand [4], Shadow Dexterous Hand [5], Robonaut hand [6], NAIST-Hand [7] and Gifu hand
[8].
Vardy proposed a hand model that is based on Denavit-Hartenberg convention [9]. The structure of
all the fingers of the model is same, so the convention is applied to all fingers in the same manner. Each
finger has five DoFs: one DoF corresponding to the part of carpometacarpal articulation considered as
belonging to the respective finger, two DoFs corresponding to metacarpophalangeal articulation, one DoF
corresponding to proximal-interphalangeal (PIP) articulation and one DoF corresponding to distal-

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interphalangeal (DIP). The thumb has a different structure: three DoFs corresponding to the carpometacarpal
(CMC) articulation, two DoFs corresponding to metacarpophalangeal (MCP) articulation, and one DoF
corresponding to the interphalangeal (IP) articulation. Very similar with the model of Vardy, Yasumuro [10]
proposed a hand model. This model has the same structure, only the CMC articulation of the thumb has two
DoFs. Also, the wrist is modeled as having six DoFs with three rotations and three translations. The fixed
coordinate system with respect to which the whole motion is analyzed is placed outside of the hand's area.
Yasumuro used this model to create, from surfaces, a 3D model of the human hand and animated it based on
a dynamic model in a human like manner. Albrecht [11] followed the models of Vardy. But unlike the
Vardy’s model the number of DoFs in CMC area is different; the thumb has three DoFs, the ring and little
fingers have two DoFs and index and middle fingers have no motion. Wu and Huang [12] treated the hand as
a set of sub-objects, each of them being separately modeled. The skeleton of a hand is abstracted as a stick
figure so that the dimension of each sub-object was reduced to its link length. Each finger is modeled as a
kinematical chain with the palm as its base reference frame. The model does not consider the radio carpal
articulation (wrist). Each fingertip is the end-effector of the respective finger kinematical chain. Based on the
two models, developed by Wu [12] & Kuch[13], a kinematical model intended to be suited for measuring and
displaying fine fingertip manipulations was developed. The base coordinate system was located in the hand at
the point where the thumb and the index metacarpal meet. The index finger was defined similarly to that
presented by Rohling [14].The model studies only these fingers, the three others adopting the index model.
Such type of hand has advantage that the hand can be used with various types of robot arms because the robot
hand has independant structure. Most of this type of robot hand has equal or less than four fingers [15]. Even
those with five fingers are not equal with human hand because they have less number of joints or degrees of
freedom.The robot hands with five fingers and anthropometric structure are helpful for the patients who are
partially paralyzed due to neurological or orthopedic impairment [16]. The need for improving the multi-
fingered robot hand arises from the desire forhandling objects of complicated shapes effectively.Therefore
the mechanical design plays an importtant role in the development of the present hand.In this paper we only
concentrate on the kinematic analysis of the anthropomorpphic robot hand and consider the wrist as a fixed.
The hand is an articulated structure. All fingers in the model have the same essential structure, having
different degrees of freedom, so the same convention is applied to all fingers. The fixed coordinate system
with respect to which the whole motion is analyzed is placed outside of the hand's areai.e. at wrist. DoFs in
CMC area is different with thumb having two DoFs, the ring and little fingers have two DoFs and index and
middle fingers have no motion. The skeleton of a hand is abstracted as a stick figure so that the dimension of
each sub-object is reduced to its link length. Each finger is modeled as a kinematical chain with the palm as
its base reference frame. The model does not consider the radio carpal articulation (wrist). Each fingertip is
considered to be the end-effecter of the respective finger kinematical chain.
The aim of the present study is to obtain a kinematic model of the anthrpomorphic robot
hand, as natural as possible and to make it capable of realizing various tasks in 3D
environment. The analysis of the forward kinematics of the proposed model is studied by
representing the active space as a complex surface (reach envelope) with respect to wrist.

2. KINEMATIC MODEL
The multi-fingered robot hand acts as a multipurpose gripping device for various tasks. Since it is
designed to mimic the human hands, most anthropomorphic robot hands duplicate the shape and functions of
human hands. The structure of the designed anthropomorphic hands is almost the same as that of a human
hand as shown in Fig. 1. The finger segments in human hand give us the inspiration to design an
independently driven finger segment to construct a whole finger. The segmental lengths of the thumb and
fingers are taken proportionately to hand length and hand breadth with a fixed wrist.Typically the hand
motion is approximated to have 27 DoFs, which includes 2 DoFs at wrist. In the present study we consider
the wrist as a fixed origin and hence the two DoFs at this point are not considered and other 25 DoFs are
considered. The thumb is modeled with 5 DoFs.The index and middle fingers are modeled with 4 DoFs each.
The ring and little fingers are modeled with 6 DoFs each considering two degrees of freedom each at
Carpometacarpel (CMC) joint for palm arch. The Trapeziometacarpal (TM) joint, all five Mecapophalangeal
(MCP) joints and two CMC jointsare considered with two rotational axes each for both abduction-adduction
and flexion-extension. The Interphalangeal (IP) joint on the thumb, the Proximal-Interphalangeal (PIP) and
Distal- Interphalangeal (DIP) joints on the other four fingers possess 1 DoF each for the flexion-extension
rotational axes. Fig.1 illustrates the proposed hand model while the parameters of the thumb and other fingers
are tabulated in Table 4 and Table 5 respectively.

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Figure 1. Kinematic model of hand

Table 1. DH Table of thumb.

Link(i) Link twist angle(αi-1) Link length(ai-1) Joint Distance(di) Joint angle(θi)
0
1T 0 L1T 0 θ1T
2T -900 0 0 θ2T
3T 900 L2T 0 θ3T
4T -900 0 0 θ4T
5T 00 L3T 0 θ5T
εT 00 L4T 0 0

Table 2 DH Table of index and middle fingers

Link(i) Link twist angle(αi-1) Link length(ai-1) Joint distance(di) Joint angle(θi)
1F 00 L1F 0 θ1F
2F -900 0 0 θ2F
3F 00 L2F 0 θ3F
4F 00 L3F 0 θ4F
εF 00 L5F 0 0

Table 3 DH Table of ring and little fingers

Link(i) Link twist angle(αi-1) Link length(ai-1) Joint Distance(di) Joint angle (θi)
0
1F 0 L1F 0 θ1F
2F -900 0 0 θ2F
3F 900 L2F 0 θ3F
4F -900 0 0 θ4F
5F 00 L3F 0 θ5F
6F 00 L4F 0 θ6F
εF 00 L5F 0 0

2.1. Anthropometric data and joint limits

As there were no exact anthropometric data for the segmental lengths of the human hand, the estimated
measurement are made following standard formulae as tabulated in table 4 and table 5, where HL is Hand
Length and HB is Hand Breadth [17] as shown in Fig. 2.

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Breadth (HB)

Length (HL)

Figure 2. Parametric lengths of hand

Table 4. Segment length for thumb

Finger Metacarpal bones Length
Thumb 0.251*HL L2T

Index L2I

Middle 0.373*HL L2M

Ring L2R

Little L2L

Table 5. Segment length for fingers

Fingers Proximal Length Middle Length Distal Length
Thumb 0.196*HL L3T - - 0.158*HL L4T
Index 0.265*HL L3I 0.143*HL L4I 0.097*HL L5I
Middle 0.277*HL L3M 0.170*HL L4M 0.108*HL L5M
Ring 0.259*HL L3R 0.165*HL L4R 0.107*HL L5R
Little 0.206*HL L3L 0.117*HL L4L 0.093*HL L5L

The angle limits for different joints tabulated in Table 6, Table 7, Table 8, Table 9 and Table 10 for different
fingers, considered from work of Parsuramna and Zuen [18].

Table 6. Joint Limits of Thumb

Joints Rotation θi θmin θmax
TM Abduction-Adduction θ1T 0 π/3
Flexion-Extension θ2T -5π/36 7π/36
MCP Abduction-Adduction θ3T 0 π/3
Flexion-Extension θ4T -π/18 11π/36
IP Flexion-Extension θ5T -π/12 4π/9

Table 7. Joint limits of index finger

Joints Rotations θi θmin θmax
MCP Abduction-Adduction θ1I -π/6 π/6
Flexion-Extension θ2I -π/18 π/2
PIP Flexion-Extension θ3I 0 π/2
DIP Flexion-Extension θ4I 0 π/3

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73

Table 8. Joint limits for middle finger

Joints Rotations θi θmin θmax
MCP Abduction-Adduction θ1M -2π/45 7π/36
Flexion-Extension θ2M 0 4π/9
PIP Flexion-Extension θ3M 0 5π/9
DIP Flexion-Extension θ4M -π/18 π/2

Table 9. Joint limits for ring finger

Joints Rotations θi θmin θmax
CMC Abduction-Adduction θ1R 0 π/18
Flexion-Extension θ2R π/90 π/18
MCP Abduction-Adduction θ3R -14π/180 π/9
Flexion-Extension θ4R 0 4π/9
PIP Flexion-Extension θ5R 0 5π/9
DIP Flexion-Extension θ6R -π/6 π/2

Table 10. Joint limits for little finger

Joints Rotations θi θmin θmax
CMC Abduction-Adduction θ1L 0 π/12
Flexion-Extension θ2L π/36 π/12
MCP Abduction-Adduction θ3L -19π/180 11π/60
Flexion-Extension θ4L 0 4π/9
PIP Flexion-Extension θ5L 0 5π/9
DIP Flexion-Extension θ6L -π/6 π/2

3. KINEMATIC ANALYSIS
Forward kinematics is used to determine the position and orientation of the proposed hand model
with respect to fixed point i.e. wrist. For this purpose a kinematic model is developed using the given joint
angles, the fingertip position in the palm frame is calculated with respect to MCP joints of Middle and Index
finger, TM joint of thumb and CMC joint of ring and little finger.The origins are located at the respective
joints marked as O1,O2,O3 ,O4 and O5 as shown in Fig. 3.

Figure 3. Global co-ordinate system

Design and Analysis of a Multifingered Robot Hand (Pramod Kumar Parida)
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The DH method is implemented to determine the DH parameters for all the fingers which are
tabulated in Table 1, Table 2 and Table 3. The global coordinate system for hand is located in the wrist as
shown in Fig.2. In order to carry out the mikematic analysis and find out the reachability of the individual
fingers as well as the workspace of the entire hand, it is essential to make use of a suitable algorithm and
transfer process. The present work uses the DH algorithm and following transformation matrix for the
purpose.

cos qi − sin qi cos α i sin qi sin α i Li cos qi 

 
i −1 sin qi cos qi cos α i − cos qi sin α i Li sin qi 
Ti =  (1)
 0 sin α i cos α i di 
 
 0 0 0 1 

Where, i= Joint Number

T= Transfer matrix at a particular joint.
q= Joint angle.
α= Link twist angle.
L=Link or finger segment length.
d= Joint distance
By multiplying the corresponding transfer matrices of joints of each finger as presented

0
Tn = 0T1 1T2 2T3 LLL n −1Tn (2)

Where, n= Nubmber of joints of one finger.

By multiplying the corresponding transfer matrices written for every finger as in Eq. 2,the kinematical
equations describing the fingertip motion with respect to the general coordinate system can be determined.It
is now possible to develop a model using Eq.1 and Eq.2. A computer program using these equations in
MATLAB is developed to capture the motion of the fingers. Every joint variable range as per data is divided
to an appropriate number of intervals in order to have enough fingertips positions to give confident images
about the spatial trajectories of these points. By connecting these positions and the complex surface bordering
the active hand model workspace is obtained. The complex surface could be used to verify the model
correctness from the motion point of view, and to plan the hand motion by avoiding the collisions between its
active workspace and obstacles in the neighborhood.

Figure 4. Profile of fingertips in the X-Y plane

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4. RESULTS
Using the Eq.1and Eq.2 along with the parametric data of human fingers presented in Table 4 and
Table 5 the complex surface described by each finger tip is generated. In all the cases each angular range is
divided into equal divisions. The profiles generated through the simulation of the independent finger tips are
spatial. The different colour specifies for different fingers i.e. red for thumb, blue for Index finger, magenta
for middle finger, green for ring finger and black for little finger.However, for the purpose of understanding
and simplicity, these are presented in X-Y, X-Z and Y-Z planes in Fig. 4, Fig. 5 and Fig. 6 respectively. The
profiles of the five finger tips in the 3-D plane are presented in Fig.7.

Figure 5. Profile of fingertips in the Y-Z plane

Figure 6. Profile of fingertips in the X-Z plane

Design and Analysis of a Multifingered Robot Hand (Pramod Kumar Parida)

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Figure 7. Profile of fingertips in the 3-D space

5. CONCLUSION
The work presented here is a part of the research work for developing a multi-fingered, adaptive,
anthroporphic robot hand. A systematic process for developing the kinematic model and confirming its
effectiveness through virtual testing is presented. The model considers five fingers similar to human hand for
manipulating objects securely. The joints, links and other kinematic parameters are chosen in such a way that
they replicate a human hand. The virtual testing has been carried out through a simulation using MATLab
and care has been taken to have a profile of the finger motion as smooth as possible to ensure a near net
shape. Ir is observed from the simulation that the developed hand is flexible and adaptive and it can very
effectively be used for the intended purpose.

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BIOGRAPHIES OF AUTHORS

Pramod Kumar Parida graduated from Department of Mechanical Engineering, CET,

Bhubaneswar, India. He has worked in Department of Mechanical Engineering as faculty
member from year 2000 to till date. Presently continuing his Ph.d. in Department of
Mechanical Engineering, National Institute of Technology, Rourkela, India Under QIP
scheme.

Dr. B. B. Biswal graduated in Mechanical Enginnering from UCE, Burla, India in 1985.
Subsequently he completed his M.Tech. and Ph.D. from Jadavpur University, Kolkata. He
was in faculty of Mechanical Engineering at UCE Burla from 1986 till 2004 and then joined
National Institute of Technology, Rourkela as Professor and currently he is the Professor and
Head of Department of Industrial Design. He has been actively involved in various research
projects and published more than 90 papers at National and International levels, the areas of
research being robotics, automation, maintenance engineering and industrial organization.
He was a visiting Professor at MSTU, Moscow and a visiting scientist at GIST, South Korea.

Design and Analysis of a Multifingered Robot Hand (Pramod Kumar Parida)