Analysis and Systematic Classification of Human Hand Movement for Robot Hand Design

The systematic classification of hand movements, which indicates the minimum mechanism of robot hands, is suggested. The performance of existent robot hands is not as high as that of human hands because the performance of existent actuators does not come up to that of human muscles in the same volume. It is important for robot hands to accomplish targeted tasks with a minimum mechanism. Human hand movements are analyzed quantitatively considering robot hands such as associated movement of DIP and PIP joints. Based on the results of analysis, we obtain three items, i.e., fingers, joints that must be set up actuators and basic movements we define. We systematically classify human hand movement for the robot hand based on three items.