Didactic human anthropomorphic gripper for automation teaching

This paper presents the design, development and implementation of a 14 DOF human anthropomorphic gripper as a didactic tool for teaching automation basics using pneumatics and PLCs. The anthropomorphic hand's fingers behave like serial robots and their motion allows performing several types of power and precision grasps just as the human hand, this collaborative motion can be seen as robotics workcell where each finger is an actuated mechanism with a specific task. Through the programming of each mechanism, the objective of the pneumatic hand is to enhance the student's skills for executing collaborative actions through pneumatics and PLC basic concepts over the device. Robotics has been widely used as a teaching assistive tool in several areas such as in training surgical procedures, manipulation of elements in hazardous environments for us, kinematics, dynamics and path planning simulations for various industrial processes, or as didactic tools for inspiring school students for working with robotics. The system's architecture is composed of an anthropomorphic gripper controlled by a PLC along with the pneumatic actuators for simulating the muscles, and the user's inputs for executing the chosen tasks. For overcoming the physical limitations of having just one device, an offline virtual environment is also developed, so several users may program and perform practices for later execution on the real device.