Design and operation of grasping devices and robotic hands at LARM

World Congress on Industrial Automation

July 20-22, 2015 San Francisco, USA

Giuseppe Carbone

Posters-Accepted Abstracts: Adv Robot Autom

Abstract :

Several industrial and non-industrial applications could be conveniently achieved by means of devices that are capable of mimicking human grasp in terms of weight, shape and size of objects that can be grasped and handled. Therefore, design solutions have been proposed in the literature either for specific grasping devices or for general purpose multi-fingered robotic devices and hands. A large variety of specific grippers and gripping tools are commercially available while general purpose design solutions are often limited to laboratory prototypes with just few market solutions. In fact, available prototypes are still not able to fully reproduce the highly flexible multi-purpose operation of a human hand, while they usually have high number of DOFs, high complexity, limited reliability, high cost. The above-mentioned aspects have significantly limited a wide spread of robotic hands in the market. Therefore, since late â�?�?90s at LARM: Laboratory of Robotics and Mechatronics, in Cassino research activities have been carried out in order to design gripping devices and multi-fingered robotic hands having low-cost and easy operation features. This presentation will outline the main design and operation issues for achieving suitable userfriendly grasping devices and robotic hands. Specific attention will be made addressed to the LARM Hand series prototypes as well as to the content of the recent book â�?�?Grasping in Roboticsâ�?, which has been edited by Giuseppe Carbone with Springer publishing house in 2013.