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Over the last decade underactuated, adaptive robot grippers and hands have received an increased interest from the robotics research community. This class of robotic end-effectors can be used in many different fields and scenarios with a very promising application being the development of prosthetic devices. Their suitability for the development of such devices is attributed to the utilization of underactuation that provides increased functionality and dexterity with reduced weight, cost, and control complexity. The most critical components of underactuated, adaptive hands that allow them to perform a broad set of grasp poses are appropriate differential mechanisms that facilitate the actuation of multiple degrees of freedom using a single motor. In this work, we focus on the design, analysis, and experimental validation of a four output geared differential, a series elastic differential, and a whiffletree differential that can incorporate a series of manual and automated locking mechanisms. The locking mechanisms have been developed so as to enhance the control of the differential outputs, allowing for efficient grasp selection with a minimal set of actuators. The differential mechanisms are applied to prosthetic hands, comparing them and describing the benefits and the disadvantages of each.

Adaptive robot hands are typically created by introducing structural compliance either in their joints (e.g., implementation of flexures joints) or in their finger-pads. In this paper, we present a series of alternative uses of structural compliance for the development of simple, adaptive, compliant and/or under-actuated robot grippers and hands that can efficiently and robustly execute a variety of grasping and dexterous, in-hand manipulation tasks. The proposed designs utilize only one actuator per finger to control multiple degrees of freedom and they retain the superior grasping capabilities of the adaptive grasping mechanisms even under significant object pose or other environmental uncertainties. More specifically, in this work, we introduce, discuss, and evaluate: (a) a design of pre-shaped, compliant robot fingers that adapts/conforms to the object geometry, (b) a hyper-adaptive finger-pad design that maximizes the area of the contact patches between the hand and the object, maximizing also grasp stability, and (c) a design that executes compliance adjustable manipulation tasks that can be predetermined by tuning the in-series compliance of the tendon routing system and by appropriately selecting the imposed tendon loads. The grippers are experimentally tested and their efficiency is validated using three different types of tests: (i) grasping tests that involve different everyday objects, (ii) grasp quality tests that estimate the contact area between the grippers and the objects grasped, and (iii) dexterous, in-hand manipulation experiments to evaluate the manipulation capabilities of the Compliance Adjustable Manipulation (CAM) hand. The devices employ mechanical adaptability to facilitate and simplify the efficient execution of robust grasping and dexterous, in-hand manipulation tasks.