The Closure Signature: a New Approach to Model Soft Robotic Hands

Underactuated and compliant hands are gaining the attention of the robotic grasping community mainly due to their simple kinematics, intrinsic compliance and versatility for grasping objects in non structured environments. However, pre- dicting, modelling, and controlling their behaviour, can present also some challenges. This abstract summarizes research efforts carried out to introduce a completely new way of representing robotic hands, that cuts ties with traditional grasp models and focuses more on the hand capabilities, rather than its kinematic structure.