Adaptive synergies for the design and control of the Pisa/IIT SoftHand

In this paper we introduce the Pisa/IIT SoftHand, a novel robot hand prototype designed with the purpose of being robust and easy to control as an industrial gripper, while exhibiting high grasping versatility and an aspect similar to that of the human hand. In the paper we briefly review the main theoretical tools used to enable such simplification, i.e. the neuroscience-based notion of soft synergies. A discussion of several possible actuation schemes shows that a straightforward implementation of the soft synergy idea in an effective design is not trivial. The approach proposed in this paper, called adaptive synergy, rests on ideas coming from underactuated hand design. A synthesis method to realize a…