Actuated Palms for Soft Robotic Hands: Review and Perspectives

The hand palm plays a crucial, active role in human grasping and manipulation tasks. However, in many of the currently available robotic hands, the palm is just a passive support holding the fingers. Most of the efforts in the literature focused on the design of dexterous fingers, while less attention has been put on the motion of the palm itself. Soft technologies opened up new opportunities in the design and actuation of multifingered robotic grippers, and led to a whole new set of devices. An increasing number of them features an actuated palm, i.e., a mechanism which contains actuated degrees of freedom that play an active role in grasping tasks. Motivated by such a trend, this article classifies and analyzes the prototypes of soft hands having an actuated palm, and delineates possible future perspectives related to the design of these devices.