A dexterous gripper for in-hand manipulation

During the last few decades, robotic grippers are developed by research community to solve grasping complexities of several objects as their primary objective. Due to the increasing demands of industries, many issues are rising and remain unsolved such as in-hand manipulation, placing object with appropriate posture. Operations like twisting, altering orientation of object, in a hand, requires significant dexterity of the gripper that must be achieved from a compact mechanical design at the first place. In this paper, a newly designed gripper is proposed whose primary goal is to solve in-hand manipulation. The gripper is derived from four identical finger modules; each module has four DOFs, consists of a five bar linkage to grasp and additional two DOFs mechanism similar to ball spline is conceived to manipulate object. Hence the easily constructible gripper is capable to grasp and manipulate plurality of object. As a preliminary inspection, an optimized platform that represents the central concept of the proposed gripper is developed, to the aim of evaluating kinematic feasibilities of manipulation of different objects.