Analysis and Comparison for a specified task between the capabilities of a constrained Human Hand and a Parallel Gripper

Achieving the dexterity of the human hand is still a far fetched idea for the robotic and prosthetic hands available today. Nevertheless, there have been attempts to come up with simpler models for constrained tasks to achieve similar results as a human hand for the particular task, if not the same general working complexity as the human hand. We perform a comparison between a simple two-fingered manipulator (parallel gripper) and a restrained version of human manipulation (using two fingers instead of all five fingers) to bring out the differences in their capabilities for the task of sorting 3-D shapes in a shape sorter. We present our observations of the capabilities of these two manipulators and characterize them in different contexts.