Design and Manufacturing of a Robotic Hand

Nowadays robotic hands or arms are used in performing various tasks in the fields of medicine, automotive industry, oil industry, household chores etc. A significant application of a robotic hand is as a prosthesis, which is an artificial device that replaces missing body parts, most often limbs or parts of limbs. It is possible to distinguish prostheses of upper or lower limbs, and prostheses of just a hand. This paper presents the design and production of a robotic hand driven by human hand movement and the student's project was realized within the courses of Robotics, Programming, Team Project and Final Paper using the problem-based learning (PBL) techniques at the University Department of Professional Studies. The first part of the paper presents the design of the robotic hand and the sensory glove. The second part of the paper includes software support for controlling the robotic hand: acquisition of data from flex sensors on the glove, Bluetooth communication between the sensory glove and Arduino driven robotic hand and usage of the acquired data for the hand actuation.