Development of a Bionic Hand Actuated by Thin McKibben Pneumatic Artificial Muscle

A type of bionic hand with lightweight, superior compliance and dexterity is developed with the thin McKibben pneumatic artificial muscles as the actuators. The thin McKibben artificial muscles with the diameters of 1.3 mm and 2 mm are used as the intrinsic muscle and extrinsic muscle of the hand, respectively. The prototype is designed and manufactured according to the biologic structure of the human skeleton, joint and muscle. The prototype driven by 35 artificial muscles has a similar size of the human hand, and the mass is less than 0.5 kg. The motion performance, object grasping ability and robustness of the bionic hand are verified by experiments, and the bionic hand can accomplish the motions similar to the human hand.