Spherical Scissor-Like Reconfigurable Palm Design in Robotic Hands: Insights from Human Hand Functionality
Jiaxing Wang, Fang Zhang, Kai Chen, Chang Liu, Guoniu Zhu, Qiujie Lu, Zhongxue Gan
Abstract
The human palm demonstrates spatial reconfigurability during the gripping process and forms a spherical grasping envelope. Based on these observations, this study designs a reconfigurable spherical palm that incorporates a spatial scissor mechanism, which only requires a single actuator to reshape the palm into a range of spherical forms. We conduct a kinematic analysis and modelling of the structure, abstracting three key parameters and analysing their influence on the motion characteristics of the palm. Through multi-objective optimisation, a set of dimensional parameters is derived to balance workspace, human-like motion, and mechanical performance. The performance of the reconfigurability and the grasping capability of the proposed palm is compared to a planar folding palm by superquadrics, and the results show that the spherical design and the reconfigurable characteristics provide larger grasping arrangement and stronger grasping capability of the palm on most of the testing surfaces.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{iros2025_sphericalscissor,
title = {Spherical Scissor-Like Reconfigurable Palm Design in Robotic Hands: Insights from Human Hand Functionality},
author = {Jiaxing Wang and Fang Zhang and Kai Chen and Chang Liu and Guoniu Zhu and Qiujie Lu and Zhongxue Gan},
booktitle = {IROS 2025},
year = {2025}
}