Nowadays, the development or improvement of soft actuation mechanisms is a crucial topic for the achievement of dexterous manipulation using. Then, a primary target of research is the design of actuation and driving devices. Consequently, in this paper, we introduce a soft driving epicyclical mechanism that mimics human muscle behavior and fulfills motion requirements to achieve grasping gestures using a robotic finger. The prototype is experimentally assessed, and results show that our approach has enough performance for the implementation in grasping tasks. Furthermore, we introduce the basis for a new soft epicyclical mechanism merger with shape memory alloys to allow active stiffness control of the mechanism.

This study reviews and analyzes the different auxetic materials that have been developed in recent years. The search for research articles was carried out through one of the largest databases such as ScienceDirect, where 845 articles were collected, of which several filters were carried out to have a base of 386 articles. There are a variety of materials depending on their structure, composition, and industrial application, highlighting biomedical applications from tissue engineering, cell proliferation, skeletal muscle regeneration, transportation, bio-prosthesis to biomaterial. The present paper provides an overview of auxetic materials and its applications, providing a guide for designers and manufacturers of devices and accessories in any industry.

Upon the appearance of nylons, silicon, tendons, smart and soft materials, wearable robotics is going closer to the human body, leading robotics and biomechanics to provide us new physical rehabilitations and improvements. In the area that concerns soft robotic prosthesis, the main challenge is the design of well sized mechatronic limbs and smart controllers that should help people to achieve desired movements. As a consequence, we present a hybrid model that allows different ways of representing hand poses, according to special interactions that arise from soft robotics chains. Our hybrid model uses the positions of finger's parts computed with the Denavit-Hartenberg (DH) method mixed with the quaternions representation to avoid singularities and to reduce the number of DH parameters. Kinematic and dynamic of finger motions are evaluated using an experimental setup with mechanical parts produced by 3D printing and different actuators. Finally, experimental results are compared with the theoretical values and demonstrate the accuracy of our model.