New Layouts of Fiber Reinforcements to Enable Full Finger Motion Assist with Pneumatic Multi-Chamber Elastomer Actuators

Fiber-reinforced fluid-driven elastomer actuators have enabled the production of simple, low-cost and safe hand rehabilitation devices. However, so far, the actuators support only finger flexion-extension, and little has been reported on abduction-adduction, which is essential for manipulation tasks and grasping larger objects. The technical design difficulty of realizing abduction-adduction lies in the suppression of interference effects...