Design of a novel compact dexterous hand for teleoperation

This paper focuses on the mechanism design of a novel compact dexterous hand of 3 fingers, 9 joints and 7 DOF (degrees of freedom). The technology of single-motor actuation is used and a kind of compact bilateral clutch is designed to reduce the size of actuation and control part of the hand. Different from most dexterous hand designs, no lengthy tendons are needed in this design since the actuation and control parts are all integrated closely to the fingers. Furthermore, passive joints are added to reduce the number of control DOF and make the hand behave like a human hand. The notion of perfect dexterous hands is discussed from the viewpoint of degrees of freedom. The hand’s kinematics and its control architecture in our experiment system of teleoperation are also briefly presented.