DoraHand: a novel dexterous hand with tactile sensing finger module

Abstract

Purpose This study aims to introduce the DoraHand, and the basic capability and performance have been verified in this paper. Besides the idea of sharing modular design and sensor design, the authors want to deliver an affordable and practical dexterous hand to the research area to contribute to the robotic manipulation area. Design/methodology/approach This paper introduced the DoraHand, a novel scalable and practical modular dexterous hand, which, adopting modular finger and palm design, fully actuated joint and tactile sensors, can improve the dexterity for robotic manipulation and lower the complexity of maintenance. A series of experiments are delivered to verify the performance of the hand and sensor module. Findings The parameters of the DoraHand are verified and suitable for the research of robotics manipulation area, the sensing capability has been tested with the static experiment and the slip prediction algorithm. And, the advantage of modular design and extensible interface have been verified by the real application. Research limitations/implications The authors continue improving the DoraHand and extend it to more different applications. The authors want to make the DoraHand as a basic research platform in the robotic manipulation area. Practical implications The DoraHand has been sent to more than ten different research institutes for different research applications. The authors continue working on this hand for better performance, easier usage and more affordability. Social implications This kind of dexterous hand can help researchers get rid of complex physical issues and pay more attention to the algorithm part; it can help to make robotic manipulation work more popular. Originality/value The key design in the DoraHand is the modular finger and sensing module. With the special design in mechanical and electrical parts, the authors build reliable hardware and can support the diversity requirement in the robotic manipulation area. The hand with tactile sensing capability can be used in more research and applications with its extensibility.

Review on human‐like robot manipulation using dexterous hands

“…DoraHand [30] is a modular dexterous hand designed by Dorabot Inc., Shenzhen, China. ‘The hand has two variants, three‐finger and five‐finger’.…”

Study on kinematic characteristics of SMA bionic flexible dexterous hand

“…It is driven by a linear embedded DC motor and can couple the index and middle fingers during flexion/extension movements, improving the grip stability of the dexterous hand. Shenzhen Dora bot company [9] has developed the world's first Dora Hand dexterous hand based on finger modular design. The dexterous hand has 3 fingers and 8 degrees of freedom, and is based on spring needles and locking mechanisms, as well as independent power and signal transmission, achieving hot swapping function for dexterous fingers.…”

Adaptive visual–tactile fusion recognition for robotic operation of multi-material system

“…However, the scenes with similar objects and object occlusion pose significant challenges to the visual algorithm. In this regard, the tactile sensor can be installed on the dexterous hand (Sundaralingam et al, 2019;Wang et al, 2019Wang et al, , 2022 to sense the material attributes of the object, such as texture (Tsuji and Kohama, 2019;Park et al, 2021) and roughness (Işleyen et al, 2019), to make up for the shortcomings of the visual sensor.…”