Design and manufacturing of a wearable portable robotic hand controlled by sliding mode controller

Hands are complex moveable organs of the human body. some reasons such as stroke can cause the hands disordering. These patients have problem doing their daily routines. Communication between human and robots lead to inventing devices to improving ability. This paper aims to design and prototype a portable wearable robot. This robot has been designed to facilitate the daily routines of patients who are not able to extend their hands. Researchers are facing challenges like high cost due to numerous actuators and innumerous sensors used to control the system. As the number of elements used to build the device increase, the ultimate weight of the device, also, grows, and practically it loses portability. According to the importance of portability of the robot and the need for long-term use by the user, device components with less weight are designed in this work. In this regard, in the introduced mechanism, a torque is applied to the lowest metacarpophalangeal joints simultaneously by only one electric operator; therefore, fingers are opened. The power transmission system is inspired from the hand tendon with the help of the cable length changes. Because of disturbances and nonlinearity of the system, sliding mode controller to minimize the error is designed. The results demonstrate that the joint angle converges to the desired angle, and the error tends to zero. Good results of the practical test, in addition to being low cost, and weight imply that we can trust the extensibility of this project.