Welcome to the home page for Project SMART Hand. Take a look at What's New in our web.

           This paper presents the development of a three fingers Shape Memory Alloy prosthetic hand with 8 DOFs. The type of robotic hand described in this paper can be utilized for applications requiring low weight, compactness, and dexterity such as prosthetic devices, space and planetary exploration.  For now it is only used for testing the principle used.

            The Internet provided all documentary in English. It contains books, journals of automation and papers presented in scientific meetings all over the world.

            In our days the potential of using a new generation of small, smart material based, high powered, biomimetic, artificial muscle actuators for robotic and biomedical applications is becoming increasingly evident. These technologies include electro-magnetics, mechano-chemical polymers, electro-chemo-mechanical polymers (conducting polymers), piezoelectric and magneto-strictive materials, Shape Memory Alloys and polymers. Of these actuators, only Shape Memory Alloys (SMA) have been used extensively in a vast number of applications including robotics and medicine. Advantages are their incredibly small size, volume, and weight, their high force to weight ratio, and their low cost. In my case I choose SMA pistons because it was something new. The advantages came after.

            The result is an anthropomorphic device that can move its fingers individually and can grasp objects of different shapes (e.g. box, cylinder). 

            My own ideas that I used building this prototype are the mechanical design (i.e. structure of the fingers), the use of Electrical Pistons® directly attached to the tendons and the control circuits.

            Due to logistical and time limits the prototype is not so „smart”. The next step will be teleoperating over the TCP/IP protocol.

What's New

The following is a list of recent additions to our web. Whenever we publish a paper, write a specification, submit a status report, or add anything else to our web, we'll put a notice here. Every month we'll remove the oldest items. The most recent changes are listed first, and each item is linked to the page with the updated content.

10 June 2003

• First SMART Hand prototype was developed.

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For problems or questions regarding this web contact [smarthand@yahoo.com].
Last updated: June 11, 2003.