A novel underactuated soft humanoid hand for hand sign language

The human hand is a very complex mechanism which dealing with the external environment with a high range of degree of freedoms to allowing it to do a big variety of movements. Humanoid robotic hands are robotic hands that resemble human hands, especially with respect to their shape and their kinematic abilities. Recently, soft actuators are drawing attention in robotics field due to their high flexibility, lightness, ease of fabrication and its low cost. In this paper, we present a novel soft humanoid pneumatic hand which consists of nine soft bending actuators assembled together in one hand which can be matching the mobility of the human hand as closely as possible and verify this ability by using the hand sign language configurations. Direct 3D printing technique has been presented in the fabrication process of the soft pneumatic hand as a new technique by using a TPU 3D printer filament. Soft actuators characterization such as the bending performance is presented by using the advantage of ABAQUS/CAE software and experimental tests. All control actions were achieved by using Arduino Mega board supported with MATLAB SIMULINK model working with graphical user interface computer application (GUI).