【Prosthetic Hands】05 First Generation - Abduction and Adduction of Fingers

    The previous article mentioned that the size of the hand I built was far from the one normal people get. Therefore, I made a major change - moving the actuators away from the palm. By doing so, the size of the palm could be significantly shrunk. Moreover, I intended to add one more flexibility to the finger motion - the abduction and the adduction of the fingers.

Picture by Lefan Wang and T. Meydan (Website Link)

    Of course, due to the size of actuators and the strength of the material I used (PLA, 3D printing), it was not likely that I could come up with feasible mechanisms to drive the finger adduction/abduction independently (which was also redundant for not many types of hand grasping require that).

    I turned to using the linkages to enable the abduction/adduction of the four fingers (thumb excluded), and the result was quite good.

    To add the mechanism, I had to make a new path for the wire driving the fingers (which eventually turned out to be a problem...). Also, I have made a huge advancement on finger driving mechanism. Let's leave it to the next article.