An adaptive robot hand (AR-Hand) has a stable grasp of different objects in unstructured environments. In this study, we propose an AR-Hand based on a tendon-driven mechanism which consists of 4 fingers and 12 DOFs. It weighs 0.5 kg and can grasp an object up to 1 kg. This hand based on the adaptive grasp mechanism is able to provide a stable grasp without a complex control algorithm or sensor system. The fingers are driven by simple tendon structures with each finger capable of adaptively grasping the objects. This paper presents a method to decide the joint stiffness. The adaptive grasping is verified by various grasping experiments involving objects with different shapes and sizes.

Tendon driven robot mechanisms have many advantages such as allowing miniaturization and light-weight designs and/or enhancing flexibility in the design of structures. When designing or analyzing tendon driven mechanisms, it is important to determine how the tendons should be connected and whether the designed mechanism is easily controllable. Graph representation is useful to view and analyze such tendon driven mechanisms that are complicatedly interconnected between mechanical elements. In this paper, we propose a method of generalized graph representation that provides us with an intuitive analysis tool not only for tendon driven manipulators, but also various other kinds of mechanical systems which are combined with tendons. This method leads us to easily obtain structure matrix - which is the one of the most important steps in analyzing tendon driven mechanisms.