A Rigid-Flexible-Soft Coupled Dexterous Hand With Sliding Tactile Perception and Feedback

The human hand is capable of executing a wide range of complex movements due to its biomechanical structure and skin sensing system. Designing an anthropomorphic hand that mimics the biomechanical structure of the human and incorporates skin sensing, presents a long-term challenge in the field of robotics. In this paper, we proposed a concept for structure design, which is to combine rigid, flexible and soft components, and designed a rigid-flexible-soft coupled dexterous hand based on this concept. For enhancing dexterous hand's adaptivity to environment, we also developed a soft piezoresistive tactile module inspired by human skin, and mounted it on fingertips to detect sliding states. Meanwhile, we have also designed an integrated system for dexterous manipulation including sensing, actuation and control, based on the concept of embodied intelligence, aiming to achieve a closed-loop control to dexterous hand. This letter provides a reliable structure and control strategy to enrich the perceptual abilities of the dexterous hand and enable their applications in unstructured environments.