Manipulation & Workspace Analysis of Dexclar: A Newly formed Dexterous Gripper

This paper demonstrates manipulation, workspace and dimensional synthesis process of a novel gripper named Dexclar (DEXterous reConfigurable moduLAR), which is capable to manipulate plurality of object. The aim to develop such gripper is to address some current industrial issues particularly the rising in-hand manipulation problem. Operations like twisting, flipping, altering orientation of an object, in a hand, require both the dexterous and adaptable properties of the gripper. To be adaptable or flexible to numerous objects while grasping or manipulating, the usual practice is to use soft material in the gripper design, which opposes the speed and dexterity of the overall operations. To solve that, Dexclar is proposed in this paper, which is supposed to build with rigid material with accordance to meet both the dexterity and manipulation problem. The 16 DOFs Dexclar is consists of four identical modular fingers, dexterous among all axes. Each modular finger is conceived to the aim of satisfying efficient grasping, manipulation and also object release with accordance to desired posture. In this paper, the in-hand manipulation, grasping and release capabilities are explained from kinematic perspective and some analysis carried through to synthesize the gripper for user specific applications.