A Novel Humanoid Soft Hand with Variable Stiffness and Multi-modal Perception

The human hand can adjust stiffness freely to realize different grasp modes, which is beneficial to adapting to different weights of objects. Therefore, humans have been trying different strategies to simulate hand, such as various rigid hand or soft hand, using different structure designs and materials. In this paper, we propose a novel five-finger soft hand. The layer jamming structure is used to increase stiffness and the vision-based tactile sensor is used to provide perception in the soft hand. Through the grasping experiment, the results show that the soft hand can effectively transmit into different grasping modes and adaptively grasp objects of different shapes. Besides, the tactile data is collected by the sensor and a recognition model is built. Through the test, the accuracy is up to 98.75%. In summary, the grasping ability of the soft hand is satisfied, and the combination of tactile sensor and variable stiffness improves performance further.