A survey of bio-inspired robotics hands implementation: New directions in dexterous manipulation

Recently, significant advances have been made in ROBOTICS, ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE and other COGNITIVE related fields, allowing tomakemuch sophisticated biomimetic robotics systems. In addition, enormous number of robots have been designed and assembled, explicitly realize biological oriented behaviors. Towards much skill behaviors and adequate grasping abilities (i.e. ARTICULATION and DEXTEROUS MANIPULATION), a new phase of dexterous hands have been developed recently with biomimetically oriented and bio-inspired functionalities. In this respect, this manuscript brings a detailed survey of biomimetic based dexterous robotics multi-fingered hands. The aim of this survey, is to find out the state of the art on dexterous robotics end-effectors, known in literature as (ROBOTIC HANDS) or (DEXTEROUSMULTI-FINGERED) robot hands. Hence, this review finds such biomimetic approaches using a framework that permits for a common description of biological and technical based hand manipulation behavior. In particular, the manuscript focuses on a number of developments that have been taking place over the past two decades, and some recent developments related to this biomimetic field of research. In conclusions, the study found that, there are rich research efforts in terms of KINEMATICS, DYNAMICS, MODELING and CONTROL methodologies. The survey is also indicating that, the topic of biomimetic inspired robotics systems make significant contributions to robotics hand design, in four main directions for future research. First, they provide a genuine world test of models of biologically inspired hand designs and dexterous manipulation behaviors. Second, they provide novel manipulation articulations and mechanisms available for industrial and domestic uses, most notably in the field of human like hand design and real world applications. Third, this survey has also indicated that, there are quite large number of attempts to acquire biologically inspired hands. These attempts were almost successful, where they exposed more novel ideas for further developments. Such inspirations were directed towards a number of topics related (HAND MECHANICS AND DESIGN), (HAND TACTILE SENSING), (HAND FORCE SENSING), (HAND SOFT ACTUATION) and (HANDCONFIGURATIONAND TOPOLOGY). FOURTH, in terms of employing AI related sciences and cognitive thinking, it was also found that, rare and exceptional research attempts were directed towards the employment of biologically inspired thinking, i.e. (AI, BRAIN AND COGNITIVE SCIENCES) for hand upper control and towards much sophisticated dexterous movements. Throughout the study, it has been found there are number of efforts in terms of mechanics and hand designs, tactical sensing, however, for hand soft actuation, it seems this area of research is still far away from having a realistic muscular type fingers and hand movements. © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.