A team of three Mechanical Engineering undergraduate students received the Best Student Design Award 2023-2024 of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IMechE) Hong Kong Branch for their final year design project on “A Cable-Driven Bionic Robotic Hand Design, Manufacturing, and Control”. Supervised by Prof. DUAN Molong, the team comprises KONG Chun-Wai, LAI Chun-Hin and Esther WUN Ga-Yun. Lai Chun-Hin represented the team to attend the award ceremony and receive the award at the IMechE Hong Kong Branch’s annual dinner on May 9, 2024.

About the project:
The Cable-Driven Bionic Robotic Hand Design, Manufacturing, and Control project aims to create a more affordable and functional robotic hand solution. Robotics hands have been a popular topic in medical, service robot, and industrial automation fields, but existing technologies often have setbacks such as being heavy, bulky, limited in realism, and expensive.

To address these limitations, the project team has adopted a bionic-inspired design with 12 degrees of freedom. This allows the robotic hand to reproduce a wide range of natural human hand movements like gripping and pinching, while keeping the weight and cost down. The project utilizes a cable-driven method and readily available materials to optimize the design, resulting in a robotic hand that costs around HK$4,500 and weighs approximately 2.5kg. This balanced approach aims to make this technology more accessible and functional compared to existing solutions.