Actuation strategies for underactuated anthropomorphic hands

This paper aims to analyze the number of actuators as well as the actuation strategy for an underactuated prosthetic hands. Two comprehensive analysis were made for this purpose. 16 possible actuation strategies in five categories of one to five actuators were defined. Based on these 16 strategies two analysis were performed: grasp diversity and grasp functionality. For the first analysis we defined a performance metric based on all possible grasps by the human hand, while in the second analysis only the top grasps with the highest frequency of usage were considered. By comparing the performance of these strategies we obtained some interesting results regarding the best actuation strategies for the underactuated anthropomorphic hands.