DEVELOPMENT, MANUFACTURE, AND TESTING OF A BIONIC HAND BASED ON A FLEXIBLE ROBOT WITH A RIGID STRUCTURE

• Main Author: Girvin Willyanto, Nixon
• Format: Final Project
• Language: Indonesia
• Subjects: Teknik (Rekayasa, enjinering dan kegiatan berkaitan)
• Online Access: https://digilib.itb.ac.id/gdl/view/78096
• Institution: Institut Teknologi Bandung

More than five million people worldwide have an upper limb amputation. The use of a bionic hand with a rod or rope drive can be an alternative solution. However, many of the bionic hand companies are located overseas and the price offered is more than Rp 100,000,000 which is not affordable for Indonesians, especially people with middle to lower economic class. In addition, the bionic hand has a high rejection rate due to its stiffness, heavy weight, and noise. In the last decade, flexible robotic technology has become an alternative approach to manufacturing bionic hands that support adaptability, robustness, and comfortable interaction with people. By using flexible materials, these bionic hands can adapt to the shape of objects without special control inputs, which reduces the cost and complexity of the system without compromising its grip performance and safety aspects. Flexible robots also have fewer components, which makes the weight of flexible robots lighter and makes the assembly process easier. To make the robot fingers flexible or so-called manipulators segmented, a rigid structure is created on the manipulator. This will allow the manipulator to mimic the anatomy of soft joints or rigid bones on each human finger without requiring a lot of pneumatics on each manipulator. Without the addition of a rigid structure on the manipulator, the angle of the manipulator curve will look like a circle. To simulate the motion of the manipulator with a rigid structure, a finite element method analysis is performed on SIMULIA ABAQUS software which will be validated and tested for performance through direct testing.