(Almost) Everything you Always Wanted to Know about Underactuated Hands (but were afraid to ask)

Self-Adaptive mechanical device are a class of linkages for which part of the control task is taken in charge by the linkage itself. The most common example of this class are underactuated robotic hands which possess the unique feature of being capable of adapting their shape to the object seized without any sensors or control scheme. While these linkages have been known for a long time (some even qualify as antiques), they have been largely forgotten and the idea to include them in modern robotic systems has only been recently considered. In this presentation, a state of the art in underactuated grasping will be presented and the recipe to design underactuated robotic hands will be revealed. Once the rules associated to this recipe are known, it will be shown how they can be extended to other mechanical systems leading to truly advanced mechatronic devices.