The Stewart Hand: A Highly Dexterous 6-DOF Manipulator Based on the Stewart-Gough Platform

Authors:
Connor M. McCann*, Vatsal V. Patel*, and Aaron M. Dollar
IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine, 2021.
Abstract:
In this work, the design, modeling, dimensional synthesis, and experimental characterization of a dexterous robotic hand based on the Stewart-Gough parallel manipulator are presented. The mechanism consists of 3 parallel-linkage fingers with 6 prismatic actuators that control manipulation. An
additional actuator maintains stable grasping forces. A computational model to predict the hand’s workspace is then utilized to determine the optimal design parameters that maximize workspace size and manipulability. A physical prototype based on the optimized parameters is built and experimentally characterized to assess its performance. The hand demonstrated a large range of motion in all spatial DOFs. Even with a simple open-loop controller, high accuracy/precision were observed in most of the primary motion directions, with only slightly decreased accuracy in the plane parallel to the palm. The potential of closed-loop control was demonstrated in a teleoperation task, wherein an operator performed 6-DOF peg-in-hole insertion task with various shape blocks. The hand design will be made freely available through the Yale OpenHand Project to facilitate future research efforts in this area.

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Can you give the article reference to the Stewart hand please?