Grasping and manipulation with anthropomorphic robotic and prosthetic hands presents a scientific challenge regarding mechanical design, sensor system, and control. Apart from the mechanical design of such hands, embedding sensors needed for closed-loop control of grasping tasks remains a hard problem due to limited space and required high level of integration of different components. In this paper we present a scalable design model of artificial fingers, which combines mechanical design and embedded electronics with a sophisticated multi-modal sensor system consisting of sensors for sensing normal and shear force, distance, acceleration, temperature, and joint angles. The design is fully parametric, allowing automated scaling of the fingers to arbitrary dimensions in the human hand spectrum. To this end, the electronic parts are composed of interchangeable modules that facilitate the mechanical scaling of the fingers and are fully enclosed by the mechanical parts of the finger. The resulting design model allows deriving freely scalable and multimodally sensorised fingers for robotic and prosthetic hands. Four physical demonstrators are assembled and tested to evaluate the approach.

This study investigates the compatibility between the soft deformation and high stiffness through the development of a soft robotic gripper for a human-scale payload. Softness is important for robotic systems that physically interact with the environments, especially for adaptive grasping or manipulation of unknown objects. Pursuing only softness would not achieve them either, and creating a certain stiffness is also an essential function in many human-scale applications. Soft robotics is unique in that it employs soft materials for the structure, and will find a lot more applications if it gains the human-scale specifications of force or the equivalent stiffness. We discuss the compatibility of the soft deformation and high stiffness based on a numerical analysis, and then present the design of a soft robotic gripper actuated by high oil-pressure, reporting its experimental validations. GRAPHICAL ABSTRACT