The role of morphology of the thumb in anthropomorphic grasping : a review

The unique musculoskeletal structure of the human hand brings in wider dexterous capabilities to grasp and manipulate a repertoire of objects than the non-human primates. It has been widely accepted that the orientation and the position of the thumb plays an important role in this characteristic behavior. There have been numerous attempts to develop anthropomorphic robotic hands with varying levels of success. Nevertheless, manipulation ability in those hands is to be ameliorated even though they can grasp objects successfully. An appropriate model of the thumb is important to manipulate the objects against the fingers and to maintain the stability. Modeling these complex interactions about the mechanical axes of the joints and how to incorporate these joints in robotic thumbs is a challenging task. This article presents a review of the biomechanics of the human thumb and the robotic thumb designs to identify opportunities for future anthropomorphic robotic hands

Combining inverse dynamics with traditional mechanism synthesis to improve the performance of high speed machinery

This paper describes a unique, computer-based, mechanism design strategy that takes into account both kinematic and dynamic performance criteria at the synthesis stage of the design process. The strategy can be used to investigate improvements in the design of any existing mechanism with geometric redundancy in its output path. By iteratively varying the form of this redundant portion of the output path, alternative potentially better mechanism designs can be generated using a traditional mechanism synthesis and kinematic analysis method. The generated designs with the most desirable kinematic characteristics can be selected and analyzed using a multi-body, dynamic modeling and analysis tool. Using forward and inverse dynamic analysis the quality of the designs can be quantified. This paper describes work done to apply the strategy to an existing mechanism. A