A Novel Monolithic Soft Robotic Thumb for an Anthropomorphic Prosthetic Hand

Abstract

The thumb of a natural hand or a prosthetic hand plays a significant role in realizing a hand's grasping and manipulation activities. This requires that mechanical design of a prosthetic hand should allow its thumb to perform both abduction/adduction and flexion/extension in order to mimic a natural hand's grasping and manipulation abilities with a minimum number of actuators. In this letter, we propose a novel monolithic soft robotic thumb for an anthropomorphic and transradial prosthetic hand. The thumb and the whole prosthetic hand were fabricated using a low-cost three-dimensional printing technology, with sizes comparable to those of real human ones but with much lighter weights. Based ..