Tendon Routing Can Improve the Dexterity of Soft-Rigid Robotic Fingers

Soft-rigid structures have recently gained popularity due to their ease of fabrication, especially with rapid prototyping technologies. By incorporating tendon-driven actuation, these structures enable the generation of significant grasping forces while offering high adaptability to objects with varying shapes. This combination of rigid and deformable components opens new possibilities in the design of robotic systems, providing both strength and flexibility in applications that require versatile manipulation. In this abstract, we present our recent improvements in actuation of soft-rigid robotic finger. The improvements involve changing the geometry of tendon channels and addition of another tendon for also performing hyper-extension of the finger tips which allowed us to achieve human like pinch grasp.