SBC Hand: A Lightweight Robotic Hand with an SMA Actuator Array implementing C-segmentation

This paper presents a lightweight robotic hand that uses an SMA actuator array. The SMA wires are activated via joule heating, implementing SBC. A coordinate transformation architecture which reduces activation signal dimensionality, known as C-segmentation, is presented. A robotic hand with 16 controlled DOF and 32 independent SMA axes was developed to demonstrate the advantages of joule-heated SBC; the total weight of the robotic hand system was less than 800 grams. 16 different grasping postures were successfully recreated by using only 8 C-segments. It was concluded that a very lightweight robotic hand with simple controls can effectively reproduce the necessary configurations for conventional grasping situations.