Soft Hands for Reliable Grasping Strategies

Recent insights into human grasping show that humans exploit constraints to reduce uncertainty and reject disturbances during grasping. We propose to transfer this principle to robots and build robust and reliable grasping strategies from interactions with environmental constraints. To make implementation easy, hand hardware has to provide compliance, low inertia, low reaction delays and robustness to collision. Pneumatic continuum actuators such as PneuFlex actuators provide these properties. Additionally they are easy to customize and cheap to manufacture. We present an anthropomorphic hand built with PneuFlex actuators and demonstrate the ease of implementing a robust multi-stage grasping strategy relying on environmental constraints.