On Compliant Underactuated Robotic Fingers

Driven by societal trends, such as aging, and by a desire to drive economic growth and enhance commercial competitiveness, researchers have tried to move robots from structured manufacturing tasks to unstructured professional and personal service applications. As announced in the Falcon project, an example of a possible unstructured professional service task for future robots is found in package-handling tasks in warehouses (distribution centers). The Falcon project aimed to design a new system architecture for a fully automated distribution center and to define, within this architecture, specific critical robotic components, which were then targeted to be researched. The author observed some inherent challenges in following such an application driven research approach. Chapter 2 presents the author’s reflections on the tensions between top-down systems engineering approaches and the classical bottom-up approach for doing research.