TWO-DOF COUPLED AND SELF-ADAPTIVE (COSA) FINGER: A NOVEL UNDER-ACTUATED MECHANISM

A large amount of effort has been devoted to design better under-actuated robot hands. The most widely adopted approaches include rigid coupled hands and self-adaptive hands. The objective of this research is to design a robot finger which combines advantages of both ways and overcomes their disadvantages. The concept of coupling and self-adaptation (COSA) was introduced. A linkage-based two-DOF (degree of freedom) COSA robot finger was designed, optimized and studied in this paper. The theoretical analysis and the experiments on the finger show that it is able to execute human-like motion and adaptive grasps in multiple patterns. The research exposes a promising novel under-actuated mechanism for hands design with wide applications.