Development of a Multi-Fingered Robotic Hand Abhon Adus, Taiwo Amosun

Abstract

The development of a robot came into existence due to the search for a way to reduce or eliminate human labour. In practice, a robot is an electro-mechanical machine that is guided by computer and electronic programming and can be autonomous, semi-autonomous or remote-controlled. This work developed a prototype model of the multi-fingered robotic hand. It consists of two parts which are the hardware and the software parts. The hardware part involves the design of mechanical and electrical structures. For the software part, the PIC 18F4520 microcontroller was chosen, programmed and interfaced with all hardware and electronic devices. Each circuit design was carried out separately and simulated to ensure it was working perfectly before making the PCB board. Hardware structures were designed, fabricated and assembled accordingly. Tests were carried out to analyse the mechanical structure of the link using solid works 12. The result of the structural analysis shows that Maximum von-misses stress is only 7.4 N/mm2 which is way below the yield strength 27.6 N/mm2 of the material. The maximum displacement is 0.0189634 mm which is considerably small. Meanwhile, the equivalent strain is 6.84391e-05. Finally, the multi-finger robot hand was tested by inserting different objects into the palm of the robot hand.

Keywords — Robot, Multi-finger, Hardware, Software, Programming