View article

To adapt to many different objects and tasks, hands are very complex systems with many degrees of freedom (DoFs), sensors, and actuators. In robotics, such complexity comes at the cost of size and weight of the hardware of devices, but it strongly affects also the ease of their programming. A possible approach to simplification consists in coupling some of the DOFs, thus affording a reduction of the number of effective inputs, and eventually leading to more efficient, simpler, and reliable designs. Such coupling can be at the software level, to achieve faster, more intuitive programmability or at the hardware level, through either rigid or compliant physical couplings between joints. Physical coupling between actuators and simplification of control through the reduction of independent inputs is also an often-reported interpretation of human hand movement data, where studies have demonstrated that few “postural …