3D Printed Underactuated Hand

Last crawled date: 1 year, 10 months ago

For an awesome class at Olin called Mech Proto (Intro to Mechanical Prototyping), we designed and built an underactuated hand made almost entirely on a 3D printer. Put simply, underactuated hands (or other designs) use fewer motors than joints (in our case, one motor for 6 joints) and use intelligent mechanical design to get the motion desired. As seen in the linked Youtube video, the hand we designed will curl its fingers around irregularly shaped objects using only a single actuator. This is based on previously designed finger mechanisms, and was very cool to work with.

I worked primarily on the wrist design, which is why there are some renders of it purely for fun. Check out the attached report (uploaded as a PDF) for our reflections on the design.

Done with Alex Spies, Daniel Dichter, and Kory Kautz